Researchers React to Microsoft’s Acquisition of GitHub

Computational biologists are optimistic that the purchase of the world’s largest hub for open-source computer code will not affect the way they use GitHub for science.

Written byAnna Azvolinsky

| 4 min read

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ISTOCK, WELLESENTERPRISESOn June 4, Microsoft announced that it would acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. The deal is expected to complete by year’s end.

The deal sparked chatter and criticism from the web-developer community, but so far, computational biologists are giving Microsoft and GitHub the benefit of the doubt—and sticking with the popular coding platform for their academic projects.

The service platform, which includes many academic research users, was created in 2008, and quickly accumulated visitors. According to GitHub’s website, the site hosts more than 29 million users—web developers and programmers who create, review, and modify code, manage projects, and develop software. GitHub’s appeal is its interface, which makes it easy to track and share software coding updates in real time with a private team or with the public.

Many academic scholars generating data that require unique software for analysis including metagenomics and taxonomy studies and neuroscience research make ...

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Meet the Author

Anna Azvolinsky
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Anna Azvolinsky received a PhD in molecular biology in November 2008 from Princeton University. Her graduate research focused on a genome-wide analyses of genomic integrity and DNA replication. She did a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and then left academia to pursue science writing. She has been a freelance science writer since 2012, based in New York City.
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