Microsoft Acquires GitHub for US$ 7.5 Billion

Microsoft is acquiring GitHub. After murmurs of possible talks between the two companies late last week, Bloomberg went ahead and reported yesterday that the deal was done and could be announced as early as today. Well, it's now official. And the Redmond-based tech giant, which has been one of the top contributors to the code repository platform, is buying it for US$ 7.5 billion, making it the second largest acquisition after LinkedIn in 2016 for US$ 26.2 billion.

In a blog post divulging the reasons behind the move, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, "Going forward, GitHub will remain an open platform, which any developer can plug into and extend. 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 on any cloud and any device."

Microsoft is trading at an all-time high (source: Google Finance)

GitHub has been the go-to place for students, developers and many tech companies, including Google, Apple and Facebook, with over 28 million users contributing to 85 million repositories since its launch in 2008. But Microsoft's courting of GitHub in search of some developer love couldn't have come at a more opportune time, especially with Apple's worldwide developers conference (WWDC) right around the corner.

Update on Oct. 26: The acquisition is officially complete, said CEO Nat Friedman in a blogpost titled "Pull request successfully merged. Starting build...".