Microsoft Corp.’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub Inc. has moved a big step closer toward closing.

The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union, today unconditionally approved the deal after deciding that the transaction doesn’t raise any antitrust concerns. The body concluded that “Microsoft would not have the market power to undermine the open nature of GitHub to the detriment of competing DevOps tools and cloud services.”

The ruling backs up one of the main points that the company sought to get across after announcing the deal in June. Microsoft said GitHub will continue providing developers with the ability to use “programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects.” This amounts to a fairly solid promise not to undermine the code hosting platform’s support for technologies that compete with Microsoft’s own.

The EU believes that the company will have strong incentive to stick to its word. In today’s ruling, the body noted that it wouldn’t make sense for Microsoft to limit integration with outside products since such a move would reduce the value of GitHub. There’s no shortage of rival platforms to which users could switch in the event the company limited support for their preferred technologies.

The ruling’s reasoning also indirectly applies to the concerns that have been raised about the deal in the developer community. Following the acquisition announcement, some programmers and scientists voiced fears that Microsoft may adopt a less accommodating stance toward user content. Such a change would negatively affect the open-source community and, consequently, GitHub’s appeal as a platform for hosting open-source projects.

For its part, Microsoft has actively worked to address developers’ concerns about the future of GitHub. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella stated in June that “we’re going to operate it as an open platform for any language, any framework, any platform.” That position was echoed by Nat Friedman, the Microsoft executive who will take over the reins at GitHub after the deal closes.

Microsoft expects to complete the acquisition by the end of the year.  

Photo: Microsoft