Microsoft has increasingly embraced open source technologies in recent years, and its projects already attract more contributors than other projects on GitHub. Buying GitHub is Microsoft's way of getting closer to the developer community. However, the plans are to still run GitHub as a standalone entity. "GitHub will operate independently as a community, platform, and business," Friedman added. "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."