This tech giant too was in the race to buy coding platform GitHub

Redmond-headquartered Microsoft was not the only contender to acquire software development platform GitHub for $7.5 million, a report in Bloomberg stated.

At a Fortune Magazine event in San Francisco, Diane Greene, head of Google Cloud Platform, said that Google also planned to buy the code repository company, the report added.

“I wouldn’t have minded buying them, but it’s OK,” Bloomberg quoted Greene as saying. However, she didn't clearly say if the company had put in a bid and for how much.

Greene also said that GitHub uses two popular Google products, “I really hope Microsoft can keep them totally neutral,” the financial news portal quoted her as saying.

GitHub serves as a code repository for developers across the world and has participants from IT majors including Microsoft, Google and Amazon. It lets users host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside millions of other developers.

The deal gave Microsoft access to GitHub's 80 million repositories of code and 27 million software developers on the platform. According to a Bloomberg report at the time of the deal, GitHub chose to sell instead of going public because it was impressed with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella and his vision of open source coding, which is a decentralised and collaborative effort.

According to a CNBC report, the acquisition was followed by a planned joint marketing partnership valued around $35 million.

Before the deal, GitHub was last valued at $2 billion in 2015. It raked in a significant loss of around $66 million over three quarters in 2016, while racking up revenue of $98 million for those nine months.

Since last year, GitHub has been looking for a CEO to replace Chris Wanstranth, one of its co-founders. Julios Avalos, the chief business officer of the company, has been taking care of the day-to-day activities in the absence of a CEO.

After the deal, GitHub became a part of Microsoft's Intelligent Cloud unit. Microsoft's Nat Friedman has taken over as GitHub’s CEO, while Wanstrath was appointed as a Microsoft technical fellow.