The rumors were true in the end, Microsoft acquires GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. And that’s not all, Chris Wanstrath is leaving and Nat Friedman will be taking on the role of GitHub’s CEO.
This agreement is expected to close at the end of the calendar year.
Once the acquisition closes, GitHub will be led by CEO Nat Friedman, who will continue to report to Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie; GitHub CEO and Co-Founder Chris Wanstrath will be a technical fellow at Microsoft, also reporting to Scott. According to a blog post made by Chris, Github has been looking for a new CEO for a while:
We have been searching for a new CEO for some time and found in both Microsoft and Nat a partner we believe will strengthen and grow the GitHub community and company over the next few years.
Nat Friedman, Microsoft Corporate Vice President, previously co-founded Ximian a company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform and was acquired by Microsoft back in February 2016.
Over in Redmond, Washington, Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO also made a blog post regarding the acquisition.
He talked about the future of Github under the Microsoft Corp. umbrella saying that Microsoft will empower developers at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise developers’ use of GitHub and bring Microsoft’s developer tools and services to new audiences.
Since the rumors started, developers on Twitter started sharing their concerns about this acquisition
And the hashtag #movingtogitlab became popular since many developers started moving their code from Github to Gitlab, another Git-repository manager.
And it didn’t take too long before people started making jokes as well about this acquisitions such as: