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 ...
