Microsoft finally returns to its earliest roots
WASHINGTON: For Microsoft Corp, acquiring GitHub Inc would be both a return to the company’s earliest roots and a sharp turnaround from where it was a decade ago.
The software maker had agreed to acquire GitHub, the popular code-repository company, and could announce the deal soon, said sources.
Microsoft’s origin story lies in the market for softwaredevelopment tools. Decades before former chief executive officer (CEO) Steve Ballmer jumped up and down on a stage, cheering for “developers, developers, developers”, Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded the company to give hobbyists a way to program a new microcomputer kit, the MITS Altair.
But even as Ballmer celebrated the developers building proprietary software for Microsoft, in the early 2000s he was critical of the kind of open-source program built in GitHub today.
Open-source software allows developers to tinker with, improve upon and share code — an approach that threatened Microsoft’s business model.
A lot has changed since then, and under CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft is supporting many flavours of Linux and has used open-source models on some cloud and developer products itself.
Microsoft is now one of the biggest contributors to GitHub, and as Nadella moves the company away from complete dependence on the Windows operating system to more in-house development on Linux, the company needs new ways to connect with the broader developer community.
GitHub preferred selling the company to going public and chose Microsoft partially because it was impressed by Nadella, said a source.
GitHub was last valued at US$2 billion (RM7.96 billion) in 2015.
GitHub is an essential tool for coders. Many corporations, including Microsoft and Alphabet Inc’s Google, use it to store their corporate code and to collaborate. It’s also a social network of sorts for developers.
Still, GitHub’s losses have been significant— it lost US$66 million over three quarters in 2016 — and it has been hunting for a new CEO for nine months.
The company had revenue of US$98 million in nine months of 2016.