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GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control,
bug tracking A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those ...
, software feature requests,
task management Task management is the process of managing a task through its life cycle. It involves planning, testing, tracking, and reporting. Task management can help either individual achieve goals, or groups of individuals collaborate and share knowledg ...
, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in
California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...
, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018. It is commonly used to host open source software development projects. As of June 2022, GitHub reported having over 83 million developers and more than 200 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the largest source code host .


History


GitHub.com

Development of the GitHub.com 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 made available for a few months prior as a beta release. GitHub has an annual keynote called GitHub Universe.


Organizational structure

GitHub, Inc. was originally a flat organization with no middle managers; in other words, "everyone is a manager" ( self-management). Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them ( open allocation), but salaries were set by the chief executive. In 2014, GitHub, Inc. introduced a layer of middle management amid harassment claims made against senior management. Tom Preston-Werner resigned as CEO amid the scandal.


Finance

GitHub.com was a
bootstrapped In general, bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input. Etymology Tall boots may have a tab, loop or handle at the top known as a bootstrap, allowing one to use fingers ...
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 Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which h ...
. In July 2015 GitHub raised another $250 million of venture capital in a series B round. Investors were Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz,
Thrive Capital Thrive Capital is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. It focuses on media and internet investments. The firm was founded by Joshua Kushner who is also co-founder of Oscar Health and minority owner of the Memphis Grizzlies. ...
, and other venture capital funds. As of 2018, GitHub was estimated to be generating $200–300 million in Annual Recurring Revenue. 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., has existed since 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 ReadWrite (originally ReadWriteWeb or RWW) is a Web technology blog launched in 2003. RW covers Web 2.0 and Web technology in general, and provides industry news, reviews, and analysis. Founded by Richard MacManus, Technorati ranked ReadWrit ...
reported that GitHub had surpassed SourceForge and
Google Code Google Developers (previously Google Code) , application programming interfaces (APIs), and technical resources. The site contains documentation on using Google developer tools and APIs—including discussion groups and blogs for developers usin ...
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 2012, GitHub raised $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz with a $750 million valuation. On July 29, 2015, GitHub stated it had raised $250 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. Other investors of that round included Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and IVP (Institutional Venture Partners). The round valued the company at approximately $2 billion. In 2015, GitHub opened an office in Japan, its first outside of the U.S. In 2016, GitHub was ranked No. 14 on the '' Forbes'' Cloud 100 list. It was not featured on the 2018, 2019, and 2020 lists. On February 28, 2018, GitHub fell victim to the third-largest
distributed denial-of-service In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conn ...
(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.


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 The domain name net is a generic top-level domain (gTLD) used in the Domain Name System of the Internet. The name is derived from the word ''network'', indicating it was originally intended for organizations involved in networking technologies ...
, Chakra Core,
MSBuild Microsoft Build Engine, or MSBuild, is a set of free and open-source build tools for managed code under the Common Language Infrastructure as well as native C and C++ code. It was first released in 2003 and was a part of .NET Framework. MSBuil ...
, PowerShell, PowerToys, Visual Studio Code,
Windows Calculator Windows Calculator is a software calculator developed by Microsoft and included in Windows. In its Windows 10 incarnation it has four modes: standard, scientific, programmer, and a graphing mode. The standard mode includes a number pad and but ...
, Windows Terminal and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on
Microsoft Docs Microsoft Docs is the library of technical documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals who work with Microsoft products. The Microsoft Docs website provides technical specifications, conceptual articles, tutorials, guides, AP ...
). On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion. The deal closed on October 26, 2018. GitHub continued to operate independently as a community, platform and business. Under Microsoft, the service was led by
Xamarin Xamarin is a Microsoft-owned San Francisco-based software company founded in May 2011 by the engineers that created Mono, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Xamarin.iOS (formerly MonoTouch), which are cross-platform implementat ...
's Nat Friedman, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI. GitHub's CEO, Chris Wanstrath, was retained as a "technical fellow," also reporting to Guthrie. Nat Friedman resigned November 3, 2021; he was replaced by Thomas Dohmke. There have been concerns from developers Kyle Simpson,
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
trainer and author, and Rafael Laguna, CEO at
Open-Xchange Open-Xchange is a web-based communication, collaboration and office productivity software suite, which enables full integration of email, documents, scheduling and social media. History Founded in 2005 by Rafael Laguna and Frank Hoberg, the softw ...
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 ''Harvard Business Review'' (''HBR'') is a general management magazine published by Harvard Business Publishing, a wholly owned subsidiary of Harvard University. ''HBR'' is published six times a year and is headquartered in Brighton, M ...
'' 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),
GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer ...
and SourceForge (owned by BIZX, LLC) 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 they were 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.


Mascot

GitHub's
mascot A mascot is any human, animal, or object thought to bring luck, or anything used to represent a group with a common public identity, such as a school, professional sports team, society, military unit, or brand name. Mascots are also used as ...
is an
anthropomorphized Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human psychology. Personification is the related attribution of human form and characteristics t ...
"octocat" with five octopus-like arms. The character was created by graphic designer Simon Oxley as
clip art Clip art (also clipart, clip-art) is a type of graphic art. Pieces are pre-made images used to illustrate any medium. Today, clip art is used extensively and comes in many forms, both electronic and printed. However, most clip art today is creat ...
to sell on iStock, a website that enables designers to market royalty-free digital images. GitHub became interested in Oxley's work after Twitter selected a bird that he designed for their own logo. The illustration GitHub chose was a character that Oxley had named Octopuss. Since GitHub wanted Octopuss for their logo (a use that the iStock license disallows), they negotiated with Oxley to buy exclusive rights to the image. GitHub renamed Octopuss to Octocat, and trademarked the character along with the new name. Later, GitHub hired illustrator Cameron McEfee to adapt Octocat for different purposes on the website and promotional materials; McEfee and various GitHub users have since created hundreds of variations of the character, which are available o
The Octodex


Services

Projects on GitHub.com can be accessed and managed using the standard Git command-line interface; all standard Git commands work with it. GitHub.com also allows users to browse public repositories on the site. Multiple desktop clients and Git plugins are also available. The site provides social networking-like functions such as feeds, followers, wikis (using
wiki software Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application), is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web applicat ...
called Gollum) and a
social network graph A sociogram is a graphic representation of social links that a person has. It is a graph drawing that plots the structure of interpersonal relations in a group situation. Overview Sociograms were developed by Jacob L. Moreno to analyze choice ...
to display how developers work on their versions ("
forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tines with which one can spear foods eit ...
") 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 are able to have discussions, manage repositories, submit contributions to others' repositories, and review changes to code. GitHub.com began offering limited private repositories at no cost in January 2019 (limited to three contributors per project). Previously, only public repositories were free. On April 14, 2020, GitHub made "all of the core GitHub features" free for everyone, including "private repositories with unlimited collaborators." The fundamental software that underpins GitHub is Git itself, written by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux. The additional software that provides the GitHub user interface was written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang by GitHub, Inc. developers Wanstrath, Hyett, and Preston-Werner.


Scope

The main purpose of GitHub.com is to facilitate the version control and
issue tracking An issue tracking system (also ITS, trouble ticket system, support ticket, request management or incident ticket system) is a computer software package that manages and maintains lists of issues. Issue tracking systems are generally used in colla ...
aspects of software development. Labels, milestones, responsibility assignment, and a search engine are available for issue tracking. For version control, Git (and by extension GitHub.com) allows pull requests to propose changes to the source code. Users with the ability to review the proposed changes can see a diff of the requested changes and approve them. In Git terminology, this action is called "committing" and one instance of it is a "commit." A history of all commits is kept and can be viewed at a later time. In addition, GitHub supports the following formats and features: * Documentation, including automatically rendered README files in a variety of Markdown-like file formats (see ) * Wikis * GitHub Actions, which allows building continuous integration and
continuous deployment Continuous deployment (CD) is a software engineering approach in which software functionalities are delivered frequently and through automated deployments. Continuous deployment contrasts with continuous delivery (also abbreviated CD), a similar ...
pipelines for testing, releasing and deploying software without the use of third-party websites/platforms * Graphs: pulse, contributors, commits, code frequency, punch card, network, members * Integrations Directory * Email notifications * Discussions * Option to subscribe someone to notifications by @ mentioning them. * Emojis * Nested task-lists within files * Visualization of geospatial data * 3D render files that can be previewed using a new integrated STL file viewer that displays the files on a "3D canvas." The viewer is powered by WebGL and
Three.js Three.js is a cross-browser JavaScript library and application programming interface (API) used to create and display animated 3D computer graphics in a web browser using WebGL. The source code is hosted in a repository on GitHub. Overview ...
. * Photoshop's native PSD format can be previewed and compared to previous versions of the same file. * PDF document viewer * Security Alerts of known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures in different packages GitHub's Terms of Service do not require public software projects hosted on GitHub to meet the Open Source Definition. The terms of service state, "By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories."


GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise is a self-managed version of GitHub.com with similar functionality. It can be run on an organization's own hardware or on a cloud provider, and it has been available since November 2011. In November 2020, source code for GitHub Enterprise Server was leaked online in an apparent protest against DMCA takedown of
youtube-dl youtube-dl is a free and open source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license. As of September 2021, youtube-dl is one of the most starre ...
. According to GitHub, the source code came from GitHub accidentally sharing the code with Enterprise customers themselves, not from an attack on GitHub servers.


GitHub Pages

GitHub Pages is a static web hosting service offered by GitHub since 2008 to GitHub users for hosting user blogs, project documentation, or even whole books created as a page. All GitHub Pages content is stored in a Git repository, either as files served to visitors verbatim or in Markdown format. GitHub is seamlessly integrated with Jekyll static website and blog generator and GitHub continuous integration pipelines. Each time the content source is updated, Jekyll regenerates the website and automatically serves it via GitHub Pages infrastructure. As with the rest of GitHub, it includes both free and paid tiers of service, instead of being supported by web advertising. Websites generated through this service are hosted either as
subdomain In the Domain Name System (DNS) hierarchy, a subdomain is a domain that is a part of another (main) domain. For example, if a domain offered an online store as part of their website example.com, it might use the subdomain shop.example.com . ...
s of the github.io domain, or as custom domains bought through a third-party domain name registrar. When a custom domain is set on a GitHub Pages repo a Let's Encrypt certificate for it is generated automatically. Once the certificate has been generated Enforce HTTPS can be set for the repository's website to transparently redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS.


Gist

GitHub also operates a
pastebin A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous pastebin.com. Other s ...
-style site called Gist, which is for code snippets, as opposed to GitHub proper, which is for larger projects. Tom Preston-Werner débuted the feature at a Ruby conference in 2008. Gist builds on the traditional simple concept of a
pastebin A pastebin or text storage site is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text (e.g. source code snippets for code review via Internet Relay Chat (IRC)). The first pastebin was the eponymous pastebin.com. Other s ...
by adding version control for code snippets, easy forking, and TLS encryption for private pastes. Because each "gist" is its own Git repository, multiple code snippets can be contained in a single page and they can be pushed and pulled using Git. Unregistered users were able to upload Gists until March 19, 2018, when uploading gists was restricted to logged-in users, reportedly to mitigate spamming on the page of recent gists. Gists' URLs use hexadecimal IDs, and edits to gists are recorded in a revision history, which can show the text difference of thirty revisions per page with an option between a "split" and "unified" view. Like repositories, Gists can be forked, "starred", i.e. publicly bookmarked, and commented on. The count of revisions, stars, and forks is indicated on the gist page.


Education program

GitHub launched a new program called the GitHub Student Developer Pack to give students over the age of 13 free access to popular development tools and services. GitHub partnered with
Bitnami Bitnami is a library of installers or software packages for web applications and software stacks as well as virtual appliances. Bitnami is sponsored by Bitrock, a company founded in 2003 in Seville, Spain by Daniel Lopez Ridruejo and Erica Bresc ...
, Crowdflower,
DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. () is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, USA, with 15 globally distributed data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provide ...
, DNSimple, HackHands, Namecheap, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid,
Stripe Stripe, striped, or stripes may refer to: Decorations *Stripe (pattern), a line or band that differs in colour or tone from an adjacent surface *Racing stripe, a vehicle decoration *Service stripe, a decoration of the U.S. military Entertainment ...
, Travis CI, and Unreal Engine to launch the program. In 2016, GitHub announced the launch of the GitHub Campus Experts program to train and encourage students to grow technology communities at their universities. The Campus Experts program is open to university students 18 years and older across the world. GitHub Campus Experts are one of the primary ways that GitHub funds student-oriented events and communities, Campus Experts are given access to training, funding, and additional resources to run events and grow their communities. To become a Campus Expert applicants must complete an online training course consisting of multiple modules designed to grow community leadership skills.


GitHub Marketplace service

GitHub also provides some software as a service ("SaaS") integrations for adding extra features to projects. Those services include: * Waffle.io: Project management for software teams. Automatically see pull requests, automated builds, reviews, and deployments across all of your repositories in GitHub. * Rollbar: Integrate with GitHub to provide real-time debugging tools and full-stack exception reporting. It is compatible with all popular code languages, such as
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
, Python, .NET, Ruby, PHP,
Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript cod ...
, Android, iOS, Go, Java, and C#. * Codebeat: For automated code analysis specialized in web and mobile developers. The supported languages for this software are Elixir, Go, Java, Swift,
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
, Python, Ruby, Kotlin, Objective-C, and TypeScript. * Travis CI: To provide confidence for your apps while doing test and ship. Also gives full control over the build environment, to adapt it to the code. Supported languages: Go, Java,
JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
, Objective-C, Python, PHP, Ruby, and Swift. * GitLocalize: Developed for teams that are translating their content from one point to another. GitLocalize automatically syncs with your repository so you can keep your workflow on GitHub. It also keeps you updated on what needs to be translated.


GitHub Sponsors

GitHub Sponsors allows users to make monthly money donations to projects hosted on GitHub. The public beta was announced on May 23, 2019, and the project accepts waitlist registrations. The Verge said that GitHub Sponsors "works exactly like Patreon" because "developers can offer various funding tiers that come with different perks, and they'll receive recurring payments from supporters who want to access them and encourage their work" except with "zero fees to use the program." Furthermore, GitHub offers incentives for early adopters during the first year: it pledges to cover payment processing costs and match sponsorship payments up to $5,000 per developer. Furthermore, users still can use other similar services like Patreon and Open Collective and link to their own websites.


GitHub Archive Program

In July 2020, GitHub stored a February archive of the site in an abandoned mountain mine in Svalbard, Norway, part of the
Arctic World Archive The Arctic World Archive (AWA) is a facility for data preservation, located in the Svalbard archipelago on the island of Spitsbergen, Norway, not far from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It contains data of historical and cultural interest fr ...
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 21 TB of data was stored on piqlFilm archival film reels as matrix (2D) barcode ( Boxing barcode), and is expected to last 500–1,000 years. 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 Fused quartz, fused silica or quartz glass is a glass consisting of almost pure silica (silicon dioxide, SiO2) in amorphous (non- crystalline) form. This differs from all other commercial glasses in which other ingredients are added which chan ...
platters, using a high-precision laser that pulses a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) times per second.


Controversies


Harassment allegations

In March 2014, GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleged that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife, Theresa, engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company. In April 2014, GitHub released a statement denying Horvath's allegations. 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." Preston-Werner subsequently resigned from the company. The firm then announced it would implement new initiatives and trainings "to make sure employee concerns and conflicts are taken seriously and dealt with appropriately."


Sanctions

On July 25, 2019, a developer based in Iran wrote on
Medium Medium may refer to: Science and technology Aviation * Medium bomber, a class of war plane * Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Communication * Media (communication), tools used to store and deliver information or data * Medium ...
that GitHub had blocked his private repositories and prohibited access to GitHub pages. Soon after, GitHub confirmed that it was now blocking developers in
Iran Iran, officially the Islamic Republic of Iran, and also called Persia, is a country located in Western Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, by Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, by the Caspian Sea and Turkmeni ...
,
Crimea Crimea, crh, Къырым, Qırım, grc, Κιμμερία / Ταυρική, translit=Kimmería / Taurikḗ ( ) is a peninsula in Ukraine, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, that has been occupied by Russia since 2014. It has a p ...
,
Cuba Cuba ( , ), officially the Republic of Cuba ( es, República de Cuba, links=no ), is an island country comprising the island of Cuba, as well as Isla de la Juventud and several minor archipelagos. Cuba is located where the northern Caribb ...
, North Korea, and
Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
from accessing private repositories. However, GitHub reopened access to GitHub Pages days later, for public repositories regardless of location. It was also revealed that using GitHub while visiting sanctioned countries could result in similar actions occurring on a user's account. GitHub responded to complaints and the media through a spokesperson, saying:
GitHub is subject to US trade control laws, and is committed to full compliance with applicable law. At the same time, GitHub's vision is to be the global platform for
developer Developer may refer to: Computers *Software developer, a person or organization who develop programs/applications * Video game developer, a person or business involved in video game development, the process of designing and creating games * Web de ...
collaboration, no matter where developers reside. As a result, we take seriously our responsibility to examine government mandates thoroughly to be certain that users and customers are not impacted beyond what is required by law. This includes keeping public repositories services, including those for open source projects, available and accessible to support personal communications involving developers in sanctioned regions.
Developers who feel that they should not have restrictions can appeal for the removal of said restrictions, including those who only travel to, and do not reside in, those countries. GitHub has forbidden the use of
VPNs A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...
and IP proxies to access the site from sanctioned countries, as purchase history and IP addresses are how they flag users, among other sources.


Censorship

On December 4, 2014, Russia blacklisted GitHub.com because GitHub initially refused to take down user-posted suicide manuals. After a day, Russia withdrew its block, and GitHub began blocking specific content and pages in Russia. On December 31, 2014, India blocked GitHub.com along with 31 other websites over pro- ISIS content posted by users; the block was lifted three days later. On October 8, 2016, Turkey blocked GitHub to prevent email leakage of a hacked account belonging to the country's energy minister. On March 26, 2015, a large-scale
DDoS In computing, a denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) is a cyber-attack in which the perpetrator seeks to make a machine or network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host conn ...
attack was launched against GitHub.com that lasted for just under five days. The attack, which appeared to originate from China, primarily targeted GitHub-hosted user content describing methods of circumventing Internet censorship. On April 19, 2020, Chinese police detained Chen Mei and Cai Wei (volunteers for Terminus 2049, a project hosted on GitHub), and accused them of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." Cai and Chen archived news articles, interviews, and other materials published on Chinese media outlets, and social media platforms that have been removed by censors in China.


ICE contract

GitHub has a $200,000 contract with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for the use of their on-site product GitHub Enterprise Server. This contract was renewed in 2019, despite internal opposition from many GitHub employees. In an email sent to employees, later posted to the GitHub blog on October 9, 2019, CEO Nat Friedman stated "The revenue from the purchase is less than $200,000 and not financially material for our company." He announced that GitHub had pledged to donate $500,000 to "nonprofit groups supporting immigrant communities targeted by the current administration." In response, at least 150 GitHub employees signed an open letter re-stating their opposition to the contract, and denouncing alleged human rights abuses by ICE. As of November 13, 2019, five workers had resigned over the contract. The ICE contract dispute came into focus again in June 2020 due to the company's decision to abandon "master/slave" branch terminology, spurred by the George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter movement. Detractors of GitHub describe the branch renaming to be a form of
performative activism Performative activism is activism done to increase one's social capital rather than because of one's devotion to a cause. It is often associated with surface-level activism, referred to as slacktivism. The term gained an increased usage on soc ...
and have urged GitHub to cancel their ICE contract instead. An open letter from members of the open source community was shared on GitHub in December 2019, demanding that the company drop its contract with ICE and provide more transparency into how they conduct business and partnerships. The letter has been signed by more than 700 people.


Capitol riot comments and employee firing

In January 2021, GitHub fired one of its employees after he expressed concern for colleagues as a violent mob stormed the U.S. Capitol, calling some of the rioters "Nazis." After an investigation, GitHub's COO said there were "significant errors of judgment and procedure" with the company's decision to fire the employee. As a result of the investigation, GitHub reached out to the employee, and the company's head of human resources resigned.


Criticism

Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the Git software, has criticized the merging ability of the GitHub interface.


Developed projects

* Atom, a free and open-source text and source code editor * Electron, an open-source framework to use JavaScript-based websites as desktop applications.


See also

*
Collaborative innovation network Collaborative innovation is a process in which multiple players contribute towards creating new products with customers and suppliers. Collaboration can occur in all aspects of the business cycle, depending on the context: * Procurement and suppl ...
*
Collaborative intelligence Collaborative intelligence characterizes multi-agent, distributed systems where each agent, human or machine, is autonomously contributing to a problem solving network. Collaborative autonomy of organisms in their ecosystems makes evolution possi ...
* Commons-based peer production *
Comparison of source code hosting facilities A source-code-hosting facility (also known as forge) is a file archive and web hosting facility for source code of software, documentation, web pages, and other works, accessible either publicly or privately. They are often used by open-source s ...
* DevOps * Gitea *
GitLab GitLab Inc. is an open-core company that operates GitLab, a DevOps software package which can develop, secure, and operate software. The open source software project was created by Ukrainian developer Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Dutch developer ...
* Timeline of GitHub


Notes


References


External links

* {{Microsoft FOSS 2018 mergers and acquisitions Bug and issue tracking software Cloud computing providers Collaborative projects Computing websites Cross-platform software Git (software) Internet properties established in 2008 Microsoft acquisitions Microsoft subsidiaries Microsoft websites Open-source software hosting facilities Project hosting websites Project management software Remote companies