A similar process occurred with Microsoft’s $26 billion LinkedIn acquisition, but the company was forced to make several concessions. It had to promise several things to give competitors a fair chance, including allowing OEMs to choose whether to pre-load any LinkedIn applications.
An Unconditional Approval
In the case of GitHub, there are no such concessions, and the Commission seems entirely happy with the purchase. “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 behavior would reduce the value of GitHub for developers, who are willing and able to switch to other platforms,” it said in a press release. “Therefore, following its phase I investigation, the Commission concluded that the transaction would raise no competition concerns in any of the affected markets and cleared the case unconditionally.” A big part of the approval is that the Commission saw no incentive for Microsoft to undermine the open source nature of GitHub. This was a big concern for some of its users, who jumped ship to other platforms. Ultimately, though Microsoft would only receive significant negative press for such a move with very little gain. The Commission notes that developers would switch to a competitor as some already have.
