GitHub

GitHub is a special website for people who write computer programs. It helps developers keep track of their code, work together, and share their projects with others. It uses a tool called Git to manage changes and keep everything organized.

Many people use GitHub to share free software projects, called open source. By January 2023, over 100 million developers were using GitHub, and it had more than 420 million projects, including public ones anyone can see. GitHub is based in San Francisco and has been part of the big company Microsoft since 2018. In 2024, people made more than five billion changes to over 500 million open source projects on GitHub.

About

GitHub started on October 19, 2007, and launched in April 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, P. J. Hyett, and Scott Chacon. It was created to help developers store and share their code easily.

GitHub began as a small, flexible company where employees chose their own projects. Over the years, it grew into a big business. In 2018, Microsoft bought GitHub for $7.5 billion, but GitHub kept operating on its own. Today, GitHub helps millions of developers around the world work together on their projects.

GitHub’s symbol is an octopus-like character named Mona, or Octocat, which was created by a designer and later became a fun part of GitHub’s brand.

Services

Projects on GitHub can be handled using regular commands, and all these commands work well with it. GitHub also lets people look at public repositories on its site. There are also special tools and add-ons that work with Git. The site has features similar to social networks, like updates, followers, and ways to see how developers work together on projects.

Anyone can view and download public repositories, but only users with accounts can add to them. With an account, users can talk, manage projects, add to others' projects, and check changes to code. GitHub started offering free private repositories in 2019, and by April 2020, all core features, including private repositories with unlimited people, became free for everyone.

The main goal of GitHub is to help with managing and tracking changes in software development. It has tools for organizing tasks, suggesting changes to code, and keeping a record of all changes. GitHub also supports many extra features, like showing code documentation, hosting simple websites, and providing tools to build and test code automatically.

GitHub also has a simpler service called Gist for sharing small pieces of code. It lets users track changes, fork projects, and add comments. In 2019, GitHub launched mobile apps for both iOS and Android, making it easier to use on phones and tablets.

GitHub also offers ways for developers to get support and funding through its GitHub Sponsors program, which lets people donate monthly to projects they like.

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot was one of the first tools that uses artificial intelligence to help people write software. It started in 2021 for users of VSCode and used a special system called Codex made by OpenAI.

Now, GitHub Copilot can be used directly on the GitHub website, from the command line, and in many different software programs for writing code, called IDEs. Users can pick from several smart systems, known as LLMs, for some of its features.

Some users have asked to turn off Copilot features, and this has been a very popular topic for discussion on GitHub’s community page for the past year. These questions have not yet been answered, and some users and projects have started using different options from open source alternatives, like Codeberg.

GitHub Archive Program

In July 2020, GitHub saved a big collection of code from its website and put it in an old mountain mine in Svalbard, Norway. This place is part of the Arctic World Archive and is close to a special vault that keeps seeds safe. The saved code included all the public projects that people were working on, plus some important older projects. The data, which filled 21TB of space, was stored on special film reels that look like tiny pictures called matrix barcodes. Scientists believe this storage method could last between 500 to 1,000 years.

GitHub is also working with other groups on a new project called Project Silica. This project tries to save all public code for much longer — up to 10,000 years — by changing the code into patterns inside quartz glass using a very fast laser. This laser pulses a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times every second, making the saved code extremely durable.

Controversies

In March 2014, a GitHub programmer named Julie Ann Horvath said the company’s founder acted in a way that was not right toward her, which led to her leaving. Later, GitHub said these claims were true and the founder left the company. GitHub promised to make changes to better support its workers.

In July 2019, GitHub stopped some people from certain countries from using parts of its service. This happened because of rules from the United States. GitHub said it still wants to be a place for developers all over the world.

Sometimes, countries have blocked GitHub. For example, Russia blocked it for a short time because of content posted by users. Other times, GitHub has been attacked by people trying to stop it from working.

GitHub had an agreement with a U.S. government group, which made some employees unhappy. The company said the money from this agreement was small and promised to give to groups helping immigrants.

In January 2021, GitHub had to fix a mistake after firing an employee who talked about safety after a big event in the United States.

In 2023, some parts of another company’s computer code appeared on GitHub without permission. The company asked GitHub to help find who did this.

Reception

In 2012, Linus Torvalds, who created Git, praised GitHub for making it easy to host open source projects. He said GitHub did a great job with hosting. However, he did not like GitHub’s way of handling pull requests, saying it was not as good as the tools that come with Git. He thought GitHub was good for hosting but not for managing changes to projects online.