San Francisco, Oct 27 (IANS): Microsoft has closed its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, a leading software development platform which brings more than 31 million developers to create, collaborate, share and build on each other's work.

Nat Friedman, former CEO of Xamarin (acquired by Microsoft in 2016), is taking over as GitHub's CEO, Microsoft said in a statement on Friday.

Microsoft announced in June that it has reached an agreement to acquire GitHub.

In a blog post on Friday, Friedman said that GitHub would operate independently as a community, platform, and business.

So developers will continue to be able to use the programming languages, tools and operating systems of their choice for their projects -- and will still be able to deploy their code to any operating system, any Cloud and any device.

"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," Friedman said.

In the coming days, GitHub will focus on improve core scenarios like search, notifications, issues/projects, and its mobile experience, the new CEO said.