A report has stated that Microsoft may be considering buying GitHub for US$5 billion. The hosting service was founded in 2008 and was valued at US$2 billion back in 2015, when the company confirmed it had raised US$250 million in funding. If Microsoft does acquire GitHub, it would be one of the Redmond-based firm’s largest acquisitions.

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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.