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Tribune withdraws from Sinclair merger, sues for $1 billion in damages over ‘breach’ of contract

www.washingtonpost.com|https://www.facebook.com/brian.d.fung

A proposed merger that would have created the biggest U.S. television company collapsed Thursday when Tribune Media announced a $1 billion lawsuit against Sinclair Broadcast Group on grounds that the conservative television giant engaged in “misconduct” and precluded U.S. government approving of the deal.

Tribune said it would terminate the $3.9 billion deal and accused Sinclair in a lawsuit of engaging in “belligerent and unnecessarily protracted negotiations” with the FCC as well as the Justice Department, which reviewed the merger over its potential effects on competition. By failing to divest television stations as regulators recommended, Tribune said, Sinclair had “breached” the companies' merger agreement, which required them to make their best efforts to secure federal approval.

Peter Kern, Tribune’s chief executive officer, in a statement Thursday. “This uncertainty and delay would be detrimental to our company and our shareholders. Accordingly, we have exercised our right to terminate the Merger Agreement, and, by way of our lawsuit, intend to hold Sinclair accountable.”

Microsoft’s GitHub takeover sends shockwaves through the open-source developer ecosystem - SiliconANGLE

Microsoft’s GitHub takeover sends shockwaves through the open-source developer ecosystem - SiliconANGLE

siliconangle.com

• Microsoft promises to keep GitHub independent and open, TechCrunch
• “Devs are flooding to GitLab amidst Github Microsoft acquisition rumors”, TNW
• Right to be scared? Probably. Everyone knows how Ellison and Oracle screwed up Java PLUS endless lawsuits against Google and Android.
• Does Google, Facebook... YOU have a plan B?

Today, Microsoft Corp. announced an agreement to acquire San Francisco-based open-source development community GitHub Inc. for $7.5 billion.

Be that as it may, there is also a strong likelihood that Microsoft, based on its public statements so far, will take the following next steps once it completes its acquisition of GitHub:

• Move hosting of GitHub from Amazon Web Services to its own Azure cloud computing infrastructure;
• Position GitHub as a strategic onramp to its Azure public cloud infrastructure;
• Introduce DevOps tools to accelerate code deployment from GitHub repos to Azure;
• Provide a transparent handoff for developers navigating between the Visual Studio Code and GitHub experiences;
• Ramp up marketing of Azure and other Microsoft offerings through GitHub;
• Rapidly integrate LinkedIn with GitHub in order to grow the Azure developer ecosystem; and
• Converge GitHub’s Electron cross-platform development framework with Microsoft’s own Blazor open-source technology for progressive Web apps.

• Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire GitHub (bloomberg.com)
• Microsoft acquires Github (microsoft.com) 
• Hello, GitHub - Nat Friedman MS Exec is the new GitHub CEO
• Microsoft Is Buying GitHub. Now It Has to Convince GitHub’s Users to Trust It., Slate