GitHub’s new CEO talks about the future after uniting with Microsoft

Microsoft officially acquired GitHub. When the transaction is completed later this year, Microsoft Vice President Nat Friedman will serve as the new CEO of GitHub. He published an article on GitHub about his personal experience with open source, his commitment to the future, and his actions. Nat stated that he began programming at the age of six, began to actively participate in open source development in the 1990s, worked on Linux for 15 years, founded several open source companies, and submitted the first commit on GitHub in 2009.

He joined Microsoft after Xamarin was acquired and Xamarin was co-founded by Nat and Miguel de Icaza. Nat claimed that today’s Microsoft is an important contributor to open source and has reshaped the engineering culture in the case of open source projects.

He believes that Microsoft is an ideal partner for GitHub. As a GitHub-loving developer, it is an exciting opportunity and responsibility to lead GitHub to the next chapter.

He knew that the community had doubts about Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. He first confirmed two things: GitHub will operate independently and will maintain its original product philosophy. He will work hard to regain community trust in GitHub.  

According to the blog post:

• GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business. This means that GitHub will retain its developer-first values, distinctive spirit, and open extensibility. We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.
• GitHub will retain its product philosophy. We love GitHub because of the deep care and thoughtfulness that goes into every facet of the developer’s experience. I understand and respect this, and know that we will continue to build tasteful, snappy, polished tools that developers love.