After acquiring GitHub for $7.5 billion, Microsoft announced that it will replace the company's current CEO and co-founder, Chris Wanstrath, with one of its own vice presidents, Nat Friedman.
Friedman will take over at GitHub, a platform he is no stranger to. Friedman said: "I've been a programmer since I was six."
The new CEO has reportedly been involved in open source development since the 1990s, and that's where he discovered Linux. He first came into contact with GitHub in 2009, when the service had only been online for a year.
Friedman stressed that GitHub will continue to operate as an independent entity and that the plan is to maintain its philosophy and ties to the open source community.
According to the post blog
- GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform and business. This means that GitHub will retain its core values, its distinctive spirit and open extensibility. We will always support developers in choosing any language, license, tool, platform or Cloud.
- GitHub will maintain its philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtful thinking that goes into every aspect of the creator's experience. I understand and respect this and know that we will continue to develop sleek, flexible, polished tools that developers love.
Nat Friedman closes the post by stating that he is not asking for the community's trust, but that he intends to earn it.
We'll wait and see...
