Microsoft Vice President Nat Friedman, founder of Xamarin and an open source veteran, will assume the role of GitHub CEO. GitHub's current CEO, Chris Wanstrath, will become a Microsoft technical fellow, reporting to Executive Vice President Scott Guthrie, to work on strategic software initiatives.
Writing in the company bog Volish CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft is a developer first company, and by joining forces with GitHub it was strengthening its commitment to developer freedom, openness and innovation.
"We recognise the community responsibility we take on with this agreement and will do our best work to empower every developer to build, innovate and solve the world's most pressing challenges."
Subject to customary closing conditions and completion of regulatory review, the acquisition is expected to close by the end of the calendar year. GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries. Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects -- and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device.
The two companies, together, will "empower developers to achieve more at every stage of the development lifecycle, accelerate enterprise use of GitHub, and bring Microsoft's developer tools and services to new audiences", Microsoft said. A portion of the developer community has opposed the move, with some already leaving the platform for alternative services.
In a conference call with reporters, Nadella said today the company is "all in with open source" and requested people to judge the company's commitment to the open source community with its actions in the recent past, today, and in the coming future. GitHub will remain open and independent, Nadella said.
We appear to be a long way from calling Open Source an industry cancer. Still developers are rather hacked off. Hundreds of developers have taken to forums and social media to express their disappointment, with many saying that they would be leaving the platform if the deal goes through. This is mostly becase they cannot trust Microsoft.
Some think that Microsoft would eventually start telemetry program on the code repository. Ryan Hoover, the founder of ProductHunt, wrote on Sunday: "Anecdotally, the developer community is very unapproving of this move. I'm curious how Microsoft manages this and how GitHub changes (or doesn't change)."
Even as Microsoft has "embraced" the open source community in the recent years - under the leadership of Nadella - for many developers, it will take time, if at all, to forget the company's past closed ecosystem approach. Just this weekend, a developer accused Microsoft of stealing his code.
A petition that seeks to "stop Microsoft from buying Github" had garnered support from more than 400 developers. Prominent developer Andre Staltz said: "If you're still optimistic about the Microsoft-GitHub acquisition, consider this: They didn't ask your opinion not even a single bit, even though it was primarily your commits, stars, and repositories which made GH become a valuable platform."
