Microsoft’s purchase of code repository GitHub Inc., announced yesterday, is widely regarded as a return to the company’s earliest roots and a sharp turnaround, Bloomberg writes.
The move is seen as a return of the software giant, which started off on the market for software- development tools, to its early days.
The Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft is now one of the biggest contributors to GitHub. The San Francisco-based GitHub provides an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, use GiHub services to store their corporate code and to collaborate.
Other functions also include that of being a social network for developers. The move comes agains a background of losses for GitHub. The company lost USD 66 million over three quarters in 2016. Last year, GitHub announced that it was looking for a CEO to replace Chris Wanstrath, one of the company’s co-founders.
In the meanwhile, GitHub’s Chief Business Officer Julio Avalos joined the company’s board of directors and is currently in charge of the day-to-day leadership of the company.
Talks between Microsoft and GitHub, which hosts 27 million software developers working on 80 million repositories of code, have been ongoing for a few years. Recently, they began talks about partnering up but progressed to discussing an acquisition.