In a blog post penned by Github CEO Nat Friedman, the company has announced that its $7.5 Billion acquisition by Microsoft is now complete. As a result, October 26th becomes Friedman’s first day as the new entity’s CEO.
Nat Friedman is the former CEO of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft in 2016) and will be taking over as GitHub’s CEO. He will report to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Cloud + AI Group Executive Vice President.
When Microsoft announced this massive acquisition, there was scepticism among the open source community on whether Github will continue with its open-source community model which it has grown on. Adressing those concerns, Friedman assured that two principle remain core to the company going forward,
GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.
GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella too has addressed similar concerns in the past. While announcing the Github acquisition back in June, he said,
Microsoft is all-in on open source. We have been on a journey with open source, and today we are active in the open source ecosystem, we contribute to open source projects, and some of our most vibrant developer tools and frameworks are open source. When it comes to our commitment to open source, judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today, and in the future.
