EU to decide on October 19 on Microsoft acquisition of GitHub

The European Commission will announce on October 19 whether it agrees with the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft. The Redmond-based company plans to acquire GitHub for a total of $7.5 billion.

The European Commission received a notification from Microsoft on September 14 about its plan to acquire GitHub. As an umbrella EU competition regulator, the Commission has to make a judgment on this. On October 19, the Commission can give the green light for the acquisition of GitHub by Microsoft, with or without the imposition of one or more concessions. Instead, the regulator may also decide to conduct a more in-depth investigation into the takeover plan.

Microsoft announced in June that it plans to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. That acquisition is somewhat obvious, given that in 2017 Microsoft emerged as the owner of the most-contributed project on GitHub: Visual Studio Code. Also, in 2017, Microsoft shut down its own software hosting site Codeplex; the company recommended that users move to GitHub. With GitHub, Microsoft probably wants to better compete with Amazon in the field of cloud services.