Microsoft, the giant company behind the popular Microsoft Office Suite of apps and the Windows Operating System is reportedly in the process of acquiring Github. GitHub is a vast code repository that has become popular with developers and companies hosting their projects, documentation, and code. Apple, Amazon, Google, are among the many big tech companies use GitHub. It is basically the Facebook for programmers.
Microsoft happens to be the biggest contributor to GitHub with more than 1,000 employees actively pushing code to repositories on coding site. Microsoft even hosts its own original Windows File Manager source code on GitHub. The service was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, but it’s not clear exactly how much Microsoft has paid to acquire GitHub.
While Microsoft share prices rose at the news, GitHub users are less convinced that the move would be a good idea. Lately, Microsoft has been more open to open source ventures. This isn’t sitting well with many people and skeptics, especially those within the GitHub community. The response on the GitHub subreddit is overwhelmingly negative, with many commenting that they plan to jump ship to GitLab, an alternative code repository service.
