Microsoft Corp. agreed to pay $7.5 billion for GitHub earlier in June, but it wasn\u2019t the only interested party. Google was in the running too, according to Diane Greene, head of the company\u2019s cloud arm.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wouldn\u2019t have minded buying them, but it\u2019s OK,\u201d Greene said at a Fortune Magazine event in San Francisco on Wednesday. Alphabet Inc.\u2019s Google has yet to confirm reports that it bid on the startup, a leading repository for software. Greene declined to say more about if Google bid.<\/p>\n
For Microsoft, GitHub is a key asset for appealing to developers in the competitive cloud computing market. Greene said that two Google products are among the most popular now used on GitHub. \u201cI really hope Microsoft can keep them totally neutral,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
During the sale process, Greene was also dealing with an internal fire over Google\u2019s Pentagon work. She opted not to renew the contract after staff protests, and Google released a set of principles for its artificial intelligence systems.<\/p>\n
Others should follow suit, Greene said on Wednesday. Similar protests have spread to rivals Amazon.com Inc and Microsoft over government deals.<\/p>\n
\u201cAny company with a large contingent of AI researchers needs to do this because the researchers are going to want to know how their technology is being used,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s a tricky thing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Microsoft agreed to pay $7.5 billion for GitHub earlier in June, but it wasn\u2019t the only interested party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":263261,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[11405,11253,167,123],"class_list":["post-266331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business","tag-acquisition","tag-github","tag-google","tag-microsoft"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266331"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=266331"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":266333,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266331\/revisions\/266333"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=266331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=266331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=266331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}