Microsoft acquires GitHub: an open source Damascene moment

On Friday, May 1, Business Insider revealed details of a series of conversations between Microsoft and GitHub, the largest open source repository in the world, suggesting they could lead to the acquisition of the company, which has spent many months without a clear strategic direction while it searches for a CEO. On Sunday, Bloomberg confirmed that the talks had come to fruition: on Monday, the media reported that the $7.5 billion purchase was official, and was confirmed by Microsoft.

GitHub is a repository of open source projects that uses version control and collaboration tools along the lines of a social network where developers can work together, improving their visibility to the community. It brings together some 27 million developers on around 80 million projects. In 2015, the site was valued at around $2 billion dollars after raising $250 million in a financing round led by Sequoia Capital.

Microsoft’s interest in acquiring GitHub reveals the extent to which the company’s attitude to open source software has changed: from Steve Ballmer’s 2001 comment that the licenses used in free software were “a cancer”, we have since moved to a scenario imaginable by very few, in which Microsoft contributes more code to GitHub than the likes of Google, Facebook or Apache. It has already provided a wide variety of tools to…