Business Insider has reported information from sources familiar with the companies involved that executives from Microsoft have been holding talks with GitHub officials in regard to potential acquisition. The Git-repository hosting service, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, was last valued in 2015, with an estimate of US$2 billion being placed on the company.
According to the new report, Microsoft may have to shell out in the region of US$5 billion to add GitHub to its growing list of mergers and acquisitions.
Microsoft has paid out more for other services in the past: LinkedIn cost the tech giant around US$26 billion and US$8.5 billion was the price for the acquisition of Skype.
But a US$5 billion price tag would certainly make GitHub one of the larger purchases in Microsoft’s portfolio.
According to data from 2017, the popular code-sharing site had nearly 20 million subscribers and 57 million repositories.
Strangely enough, the original author of the Git version control system was Linus Torvalds, the renowned software engineer who created the Linux kernel.
If Microsoft does acquire GitHub, it could be seen as a visible attempt to further integrate Linux and Windows and increase interoperability, as demonstrated by the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) compatibility layer found in Windows 10.
