European Commission approves Microsoft's GitHub acquisition

Microsoft today received approval from EU antitrust regulators on its $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub. In a statement released today, the European Commission said that the deal has it's approval, requiring no concessions from Microsoft for it to go forward (via Reuters).

From the statement:

The Commission found that the combination of Microsoft and GitHub's activities on these markets would raise no competition concerns because the merged entity would continue to face significant competition from other players on both markets.

The Commission also found that the combination of Microsoft and GitHub wouldn't limit developers' access to other development platforms.

The market investigation confirmed that Microsoft would not have the market power to undermine the open nature of GitHub to the detriment of competing DevOps tools and cloud services. This is because such behaviour would reduce the value of GitHub for developers, who are willing and able to switch to other platforms.

According to the details of the deal Microsoft revealed in June, GitHub will continue to operate independently, with Microsoft Corporate Vice President Nat Friedman taking over as CEO.

"GitHub will retain its developer-first ethos and will operate independently to provide an open platform for all developers in all industries," Microsoft said. "Developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects — and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any cloud and any device."