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Microsoft officially announced a $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub. Will developers buy it?
Microsoft has finally finalized its acquisition of GitHub.
On the evening of June 4, Microsoft officially announced plans to purchase GitHub, a software code hosting website, with a share price of $7.5 billion, which is expected to be completed by the end of this year.
GitHub was founded in April 2008, just ten years ago. In 2015, GitHub was valued at $2 billion. In just three years, the market value of GitHub has nearly quadrupled, becoming the most popular social programming and code hosting platform.

According to statistics, as of March this year, GitHub had 28 million high-frequency users and hosted 80 million source code repositories for programming language software such as Java, Python and C + +. Public institutions such as NASA and large technology companies such as Google, apple and Amazon also have businesses on GitHub.
The GitHub community is nicknamed "the world's largest same-sex dating site" by Chinese programmers for its predominantly white male users, which are said to account for 97%.
According to Chris wanstrath, CEO of GitHub, the community platform made profits as early as 2011. At present, GitHub has three main profit models: Code hosting service, data precipitation and cloud storage, and enterprise headhunting recruitment community.
According to CNBC's report last year, GitHub expects annual revenue to exceed $200 million, of which more than $110 million comes from b-end enterprise service revenue.
People familiar with the matter said that such a profitable company did not choose to go public but surrendered to Microsoft, in part because of its strong trust in Microsoft's ability and determination to value its developer business.
Interestingly, Microsoft was a strong opponent of open source software, but after NADELLA became the CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft gradually became one of the most active promoters of the open source community. Since 2014, Microsoft has launched hundreds of open-source projects. In 2016, Microsoft has surpassed Facebook and Google to the top of GitHub's contribution list.
As for the significance of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, NADELLA commented on twitter that "Microsoft + GitHub = enabling developer". According to the speculation of the insiders, from the perspective of Microsoft's integration of part of GitHub's revenue into the Intelligent Cloud business segment, it is to promote the strategy of "Ai + cloud", so as to promote developers to develop applications for Microsoft's multi platform including the cloud platform azure cloud.
^ from left to right: Chris wanstrath, co-founder of GitHub, Satya NADELLA, CEO of Microsoft, and NAT Friedman, new CEO of GitHub
Microsoft said that in the future, GitHub will maintain its original style of operation, with developer first and independent operation.
After the acquisition, NAT Friedman, vice president of Microsoft, will be the CEO of GitHub. Chris wanstrath, co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, will become a Microsoft technology researcher, report to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president, and carry out a strategic software development plan.
For a long time, people have been cynical and skeptical about Microsoft's big acquisitions because of Nokia, hotmail and Skype. So what's the future of GitHub? Maybe only time will tell.