As part of its effort to get even closer to the developer community, Microsoft is acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion. GitHub controls the open source repository that is at the center of millions of DevOps processes and is home to up to 28 million developers worldwide.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub will remain an open platform that developers will be able to employ for any programming language to deploy software anywhere. As part of that commitment, GitHub will continue to operate as a Microsoft business unit led by Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin who will assume the role of GitHub CEO. Current GitHub CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie. Wanstrath previously announced his intention to step down as the CEO of GitHub. The deal is expected to close before the end of this calendar year.
Nadella said Microsoft is committed to acting as a steward for GitHub rather than making the open source repository an element of the application development business unit.
Microsoft recognizes that GitHub is the platform through which millions of developers now collaborate, said Nadella. Acquiring GitHub presents the company with an opportunity to get closer to the developer community by providing both the platform they collaborate on as well as the tools many of them rely on to build applications. That’s critical now because as more organizations transform into software companies, those organizations are pouring more resources into application development and workflows than ever, Nadella said.
Friedman said GitHub will focus on making it easier for cloud service providers to plug their platforms into GitHub, adding Microsoft is also committing to making all its application development tools available on the GitHub marketplace. The company also will make GitHub services available via its direct sales and reseller channel.
It’s unclear yet how the open source community that relies on GitHub will react to the stewardship of Microsoft. There are plenty of smaller repository options that might benefit from developers deciding to shift their allegiance. Microsoft clearly is aware of the potential downside, which helps account for why Friedman is stressing that any effort to make it simple to integrate GitHub with cloud services would apply to all services, not just Azure. At the same time, however, given its long history of delivering application development tools, there’s probably a deeper appreciation for how GitHub plays to a Microsoft customer base that counts developers as its largest segment.
On the plus side, Microsoft will become a much bigger advocate for application development based on open source code. The company steadily has been making large swaths of its application development tools available as open source code. Less clear is to what degree it will be willing to embrace open source across its entire portfolio. With more than 2 million commits made to GitHub a year, Microsoft claims to be the largest contributor to GitHub.
The challenge from a DevOps perspective, however, is not the repository employed to house code, but rather how well that repository fits into a larger continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) environment.
— Mike Vizard
