GitHub is a proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project.[9] GitHub, headquartered in San Francisco, is operated by Github, Inc., a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
It is commonly used to host open source software development projects.[10] As of, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories.[11] It is the world's largest source code host as of June 2023. Over five billion developer contributions were made to more than 500 million open source projects in 2024.[12]
About
Founding
The development of the GitHub platform began on October 19, 2007.[13] The site was launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, and Scott Chacon after it had been available for a few months as a beta release.[14]
Structure of the organization
GitHub was originally a flat organization with no middle managers, instead relying on self-management.[15] Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them (open allocation), but the chief executive set salaries.[16]
Services
Projects on GitHub can be accessed and managed using the standard Git command-line interface; all standard Git commands work with it. GitHub also allows users to browse public repositories on the site. Multiple desktop clients and Git plugins are also available. In addition, the site provides social networking-like functions such as feeds, followers, wikis (using wiki software called Gollum), and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions ("forks") of a repository and what fork (and branch within that fork) is newest.
Anyone can browse and download public repositories, but only registered users can contribute content to repositories. With a registered user account, users can have discussions, manage repositories, submit contributions to others' repositories, and review changes to code. GitHub began offering limited private repositories at no cost in January 2019 (limited to three contributors per project). Previously, only public repositories were free.[69][70][71] On April 14, 2020, GitHub made "all of the core GitHub features" free for everyone, including "private repositories with unlimited collaborators."
GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot was one of the first widely adopted AI-assisted software development tools. The preview launched in 2021 for VSCode users and was based on OpenAI's Codex model.
GitHub Copilot is now available to use on GitHub.com directly, on the command line, as well as in several IDEs. Users are able to choose from a range of LLMs for some features.
User requests to block the Copilot features have been the #1 and #2 most popular topics of the past 12 months on GitHub's organization community page as of September 2025. The topics remain unanswered. Some users and projects have moved to open source alternatives such as Codeberg.[116]
GitHub Archive Program
In July 2020, GitHub stored a February archive of the site[117] in an abandoned mountain mine in Svalbard, Norway, part of the Arctic World Archive and not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The archive contained the code of all active public repositories, as well as that of dormant but significant public repositories. The 21TB of data was stored on piqlFilm archival film reels as matrix (2D) barcode (Boxing barcode), and is expected to last 500–1,000 years.[118][119][120][121]
The GitHub Archive Program is also working with partners on Project Silica, in an attempt to store all public repositories for 10,000 years. It aims to write archives into the molecular structure of quartz glass
Controversies
Harassment allegations
In March 2014, GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleged that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company.[122] In April 2014, GitHub released a statement denying Horvath's allegations.[123][124][125] However, following an internal investigation, GitHub confirmed the claims. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath wrote on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office."[126]
Reception
In 2012, Linus Torvalds, the original developer of Git, highly praised GitHub, stating, "The hosting of github [sic] is excellent. They've done a good job on that. I think GitHub should be commended enormously for making open source project hosting so easy." However, he also sharply criticized the implementation of GitHub's merging interface, saying, "Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but GitHub instead decided to replace it with its own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider GitHub useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage."[155][156]
See also
- Collaborative innovation network
- Collaborative intelligence
- Commons-based peer production
- Comparison of source code hosting facilities
- DevOps
- Gitea
- GitLab
- Codeberg
- Timeline of GitHub
- GitHub Copilot
- Replit
External links
References
- New Year, New Company GitHub^
- Microsoft says GitHub now has a $1B ARR, 90M active users TechCrunch, October 25, 2022, retrieved March 20, 2023^
- GitHub Diversity GitHub, retrieved November 26, 2019^