Summary: Microsoft said in a filing late Thursday that it has made a $1.3 billion cash payment to acquire coding hosting startup GitHub.
Microsoft acquired the company, which is used to track changes in software code as applications are written, in June in a $7.5 billion deal that was described at the time as an all-stock deal.
But in a filing on November 8, Microsoft said the $7.5 billion figure "includes $1.3 billion in cash payments for GitHub equity awards and indemnified escrow" and that the deal closed on October 25 . Microsoft did not immediately respond for comment.
Software developers use GitHub to host and share code as they are written, and often use it to distribute open source software. The GitHub deal is part of Microsoft's broader embrace of open source software and its efforts in recent years to favor software developers from rivals like Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com.
Last year, the software giant shut down its own GitHub competitor CodePlex, saying it was the primary place for open source sharing and that most such projects had moved there.
Recommended related learning tutorials:GitHub video tutorial
Why do programmers oppose Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub?
When they heard the news that GitHub might be acquired by Microsoft for US$5 billion, the vast majority of programmers must have refused in their hearts, otherwise there would be no such thing:
"Microsoft bought so many products, but in the end they became garbage..."
"GitHub should remain neutral and cannot be acquired by any company..."
"GitHub has developed into Without him, programming will be much less efficient. GitHub is like a portal."
"GitHub should become another SourceForge or CodePlex, and I will find another place to host code."
"If you want to be acquired, you also want to be acquired by Google. If you integrate Microsoft Azure, the Web will change."
It is worth mentioning that in November last year, the world's famous technical question and answer community Stack Overflow The layoffs were confirmed, involving nearly 20% of its 300 employees. The author is helpless: as a community forum that was a holy place in the hearts of technology developers back then, it is dead and disabled. Now even GitHub is facing the dilemma of being acquired.
On June 4, Beijing time, foreign media Bloomberg reported that people familiar with the matter revealed that Microsoft has agreed to acquire the code hosting platform GitHub, and the transaction will be announced as soon as this Monday (U.S. local time). In fact, as early as last Friday, Business Insider first disclosed that Microsoft had held talks in the past few weeks to discuss acquiring GitHub.
According to a person familiar with the matter who did not want to disclose confidential information, GitHub gave up its original plan to go public and chose to sell to Microsoft in part because of their concerns about Microsoft CEO Satya Nader. La was very impressed.
Bloomberg reported that the acquisition provides a way out for San Francisco-based GitHub, which has been trying to find a new CEO for the past nine months and that its main business has not yet become profitable. .
As of now, the terms of the transaction agreement have not been announced. Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw declined to comment, and GitHub also declined to comment.
▌Why did GitHub end up like this?
It is understood that GitHub’s last valuation was in 2015, which was close to US$2 billion.
It can be seen that since its establishment in 2008, GitHub has received a total of three rounds of huge financing, and has been favored by famous venture capital institutions A16z and Sequoia Capital.
However, it seems that since 2016, GitHub has begun to decline. It lost $66 million in the first three quarters of 2016, despite operating income of $98 million.
At the time, according to information disclosed by people familiar with the matter and a Bloomberg review of its financial documents, the company continued to lose money due to excessive expenses and a wait-and-see attitude in the face of emerging competitors. However, Chris Wanstrath has also announced that he will resign as CEO because he wants to travel and write code to understand users deeply.
In August 2017, GitHub announced that it was looking for a CEO to replace Chris Wanstrath, one of the company’s founders. During the transition period, Github chief business officer Julio Avalos joined the board of directors and took over the day-to-day leadership of the company.
▌Where does Microsoft fancy GitHub?
Simply put, GitHub is a software source code hosting service for version control through Git. It was originally written in Ruby on Rails by Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner. GitHub provides both paid and free accounts. Paid accounts can create private code repositories.
For programmers, GitHub is an essential tool. Many companies, including Microsoft and Google, will choose GitHub to store the company and collaborate.
Currently, there are nearly 27 million software developers on the GitHub platform, supporting their more than 80 million code bases. This is why GitHub is said to be a gay social platform for developers.
It is worth mentioning that Microsoft, which once opposed open source software development, has now become one of the largest contributors on GitHub.
Since Nadella took the helm in 2014, Microsoft has completed a series of amazing transformations: reducing the importance of Windows, focusing on mobile and cloud computing, embracing open source, and transferring the company's internal development to rely entirely on the Windows operating system to Linux. Stay connected with the developer community in new ways.
However, CodePlex, a code hosting platform owned by Microsoft, was one of GitHub's most powerful competitors. However, the platform announced that it would cease operation and maintenance in 2017 and was officially closed in early 2018.
In the past few years, Microsoft and GitHub were in intermittent contact.
Some comments say that once it gains access to the hundreds of millions of developers working in millions of companies on GitHub, it will be easier to encourage them to use Microsoft's cloud services and other products to defeat its opponents. 1 Amazon.
▌What if GitHub is really acquired?
Liu Jiang, dean of Meituan Dianping Technology College, commented after seeing the news:
Many students may wonder if GitHub is not developing very well. Programmers use it every day. You can’t live without it at all, so how could you sell it? In fact, from a commercial perspective, GitHub’s path has been blocked. This fierce player is Atlassian from Australia, with a market value of almost US$15 billion. StackOverflow, another must-have for coders, has not had any new financing news for a long time, and it seems to be unfavorable for development.
At the same time, we also noticed that GitLab, one of GitHub’s competitors, has launched a tool to migrate from GitHub to GitLab, and starting at 0:00 on June 4, both Project and Repository will be ushered in instantly. migration peak.
A netizen from HackerNews commented:
Users on GitHub not only share code, but also keep in touch with each other. GitHub succeeds because it is not just a free online Git repository service, but also a community of developers and users.
For example, Bitbucket is another website that offers Git hosting services, but it has failed to build its own community. result? It has received less attention compared to GitHub.
So, although GitLab also tries to be "another" place to host source code for programmers, the advantages of being a community cannot be ignored. If possible, connect all GitLab instances together to form a larger global community to support (programmers).
Returning to GitHub in this article, perhaps there are still variables in Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub, but a considerable number of domestic and foreign developer communities and users seem to be ready to make a move.
Finally, I would like to leave you with a question: In terms of code hosting, it is difficult to find a better platform than GitHub, but GitHub itself is very difficult to make money. If GitHub really joins the Microsoft ecosystem one day, what role will it play?
