GitHub

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. 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. As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories. 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.

About

Founding

The development of the GitHub platform began on October 19, 2007. 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.

Structure of the organization

GitHub was originally a flat organization with no middle managers, instead relying on self-management. Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them (open allocation), but the chief executive set salaries.

In 2014, the company added a layer of middle management in response to harassment allegations against its co-founder and then-CEO, Thomas Preston-Werner, and his wife Theresa. As a result of the scandal, Preston-Werner resigned from his position as CEO. Co-founder and product lead, Chris Wanstrath, became CEO. Julio Avalos, then general counsel and administrative officer, assumed control over GitHub's business operations and day-to-day management.

Finance

GitHub was a bootstrapped start-up business, which in its first years provided enough revenue to be funded solely by its three founders and start taking on employees.

In July 2012, four years after the company was founded, Andreessen Horowitz invested $100 million in venture capital with a $750 million valuation.

In July 2015 GitHub raised another $250 million (~$322 million in 2024) of venture capital in a series B round. The lead investor was Sequoia Capital, and other investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, IVP (Institutional Venture Partners), and other venture capital funds. The company was then valued at approximately $2 billion.

As of 2023, GitHub was estimated to generate $1 billion in revenue annually.

History

The GitHub service was developed by Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner, and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails, and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., was formed in 2007 and is located in San Francisco.

On February 24, 2009, GitHub announced that within the first year of being online, GitHub had accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month. At that time, about 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once, and 4,600 had been merged.

That same year, the site was used by over 100,000 users, according to GitHub, and had grown to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories.

In 2010, GitHub was hosting 1 million repositories. A year later, this number doubled. ReadWriteWeb reported that GitHub had surpassed SourceForge and Google Code in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011. On January 16, 2013, GitHub passed the 3 million users mark and was then hosting more than 5 million repositories. By the end of the year, the number of repositories was twice as great, reaching 10 million repositories.

In 2015, GitHub opened an office in Japan, its first outside of the U.S.

On February 28, 2018, GitHub fell victim to the third-largest distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack in history, with incoming traffic reaching a peak of about 1.35 terabits per second.

On June 19, 2018, GitHub expanded its GitHub Education by offering free education bundles to all schools.

On June 11, 2019, it was announced that former Bitnami chief operating officer (COO) and co-founder, Erica Brescia, would be GitHub's COO.

On November 3, 2021, GitHub announced that CEO Nat Friedman, who became CEO when Microsoft acquired GitHub, was stepping down as CEO and GitHub's chief product officer, Thomas Dohmke, would become CEO on November 15.

In June 2025, the amount of repositories on GitHub surpassed one billion. Notably, the billionth repository contained nothing but the word "shit".

On August 11, 2025 Thomas Dohmke announced that he was to step down as CEO at the end of 2025, to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors; Microsoft did not immediately share its intention to find a direct replacement.

Acquisition by Microsoft

From 2012, Microsoft became a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open-source projects and development tools such as .NET Core, Chakra Core, MSBuild, PowerShell, PowerToys, Visual Studio Code, Windows Calculator, Windows Terminal and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on Microsoft Docs).

On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion (~$9.2 billion in 2024). The deal closed on October 26, 2018. According to Microsoft, GitHub continued to operate independently as a community, platform and business. Under Microsoft, the service was led by Xamarin's Nat Friedman, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI.

There have been concerns from developers Kyle Simpson, JavaScript trainer and author, and Rafael Laguna, CEO at Open-Xchange over Microsoft's purchase, citing uneasiness over Microsoft's handling of previous acquisitions, such as Nokia's mobile business and Skype.

This acquisition was in line with Microsoft's business strategy under CEO Satya Nadella, which has seen a larger focus on cloud computing services, alongside the development of and contributions to open-source software. Harvard Business Review argued that Microsoft was intending to acquire GitHub to get access to its user base, so it can be used as a loss leader to encourage the use of its other development products and services.

Concerns over the sale bolstered interest in competitors: Bitbucket (owned by Atlassian), SourceForge (owned by Slashdot) and GitLab reported that they had seen spikes in new users intending to migrate projects from GitHub to their respective services.

In September 2019, GitHub acquired Semmle, a code analysis tool. In February 2020, GitHub launched in India under the name GitHub India Private Limited. In March 2020, GitHub announced that it was acquiring npm, a JavaScript packaging vendor, for an undisclosed sum of money. The deal was closed on April 15, 2020.

In early July 2020, the GitHub Archive Program was established to archive its open-source code in perpetuity.

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