GitHub () is a

proprietary {{Short pages monitor including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the world's largest

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

host 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, 2005. The site was launched in April 2008 by

Tom Preston-Werner Thomas Preston-Werner (born May 27, 1979) is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the free and open-source software community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he l ...

Chris Wanstrath Chris Wanstrath (born March 13, 1985) is an American technology entrepreneur and programmer. He is the founder of Null Games, and the co-founder and former CEO of GitHub, an Internet hosting service for software development and version control ...

, P. J. Hyett and Scott Chacon after it had been available for a few months as a

beta release The software release life cycle is the process of developing, testing, and distributing a software product (e.g., an operating system). It typically consists of several stages, such as pre-alpha, alpha, beta, and release candidate, before the fi ...

. Its name was chosen as a compound of ''

Git Git () is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively. Design goals of Git include speed, data integrity, and suppor ...

'' and ''hub''.

Structure of the organization

GitHub, Inc. was originally a

flat organization A flat organization (or horizontal organization) is an organizational structure with few levels of management between staff and executives. An organizational structure refers to the nature of the distribution of the units and positions within it, ...

with no middle managers, instead relying on self-management. Employees could choose to work on projects that interested them (

open allocation Open allocation refers to a style of management in which employees are given a high degree of freedom in choosing what projects to work on, and how to allocate their time. They do not necessarily answer to a single manager, but to the company and ...

), but the chief executive set salaries. In 2014, the company added a layer of

middle management Middle management is the intermediate management level of a hierarchical organization that is subordinate to the executive management and responsible for "team leading" line managers and/or "specialist" line managers. Middle management is indire ...

in response to harassment allegations against its co-founder and then-CEO, Thomas Preston-Werner, and his wife, Theresa Preston-Werner. As a result of the scandal,

resigned from his position as CEO. Co-founder and Product lead,

, 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 In general, bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input. Many analytical techniques are often called bootstrap methods in reference to their self-starting or self-supporting ...

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 AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

invested $100 million in

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

with a $750 million valuation. In July 2015 GitHub raised another $250 million (~$ in ) of venture capital in a

series B round A venture round is a type of funding round used for venture capital financing, by which startup companies obtain investment, generally from venture capitalists and other institutional investors. The availability of venture funding is among the p ...

. The lead investor was

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California, specializing in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. the firm had appro ...

, and other investors were

Thrive Capital Thrive Capital Management, LLC, commonly Thrive Capital, is an American venture capital firm based in New York City. It focuses on software and internet investments. The firm was founded by Joshua Kushner who is also co-founder of Oscar Health ...

, IVP (Institutional Venture Partners) and other venture capital funds. The company was then valued at approximately $2 billion. GitHub was estimated to generate $1 billion in revenue annually.

History

The GitHub service was developed by

, P. J. Hyett,

, and Scott Chacon using

Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails (simplified as Rails) is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pa ...

, and started in February 2008. The company, GitHub, Inc., was formed in 2007 and is located in San Francisco. GithubAWSTorontoSummit

Mapping collaborative software on GitHub

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 SourceForge is a web service founded by Geoffrey B. Jeffery, Tim Perdue, and Drew Streib in November 1999. SourceForge provides a centralized software discovery platform, including an online platform for managing and hosting open-source soft ...

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 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.

Acquisition by Microsoft

Number of open source contributors by company

From 2012,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

became a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open-source projects and development tools such as .NET Core, Chakra Core, MSBuild,

PowerShell PowerShell is a shell program developed by Microsoft for task automation and configuration management. As is typical for a shell, it provides a command-line interpreter for interactive use and a script interpreter for automation via a langu ...

, PowerToys,

Visual Studio Code Visual Studio Code, commonly referred to as VS Code, is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code comp ...

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 butto ...

Windows Terminal Windows Terminal is a Tabbed, multi-tabbed terminal emulator developed by Microsoft for Windows 10 and later as a replacement for Windows Console. It can run any command-line app in a separate tab. It is preconfigured to run Windows Command Pro ...

and the bulk of its product documentation (now to be found on

Microsoft Docs Microsoft Docs was a library of technical documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals who work with Microsoft products. The Microsoft Docs website provided technical specifications, conceptual articles, tutorials, guides, API ...

). On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intent to acquire GitHub for US$7.5 billion (~$ in ). 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 (software), Mono, Mono (software)#Xamarin.Android, Xamarin.Android (formerly Mono for Android) and Mono (software)#Xamarin.i ...

Nat Friedman Nathaniel Dourif Friedman (born 6 August 1977) is an American technology executive and investor. He was the chief executive officer (CEO) of GitHub and former chairman of the GNOME Foundation. Friedman is currently a board member at the Arc Instit ...

, reporting to Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft Cloud and AI.

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 and core technology of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. Ninety-nine percent of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior. Web browsers have ...

trainer and author, and Rafael Laguna, CEO at

Open-Xchange Open-Xchange is an open source web-based office productivity software suite. History Founded in 2005 by Rafael Laguna and Frank Hoberg, the software was released in December of the same year, and started as a Linux-based email and groupware prog ...

over Microsoft's purchase, citing uneasiness over Microsoft's handling of previous acquisitions, such as Nokia's mobile business and

Skype Skype () was a proprietary telecommunications application operated by Skype Technologies, a division of Microsoft, best known for IP-based videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also had instant messaging, file transfer, ...

. This acquisition was in line with Microsoft's business strategy under CEO

Satya Nadella Satya Narayana Nadella (; born 19 August 1967) is an Indian-born American business executive who is the chairman and chief executive officer (CEO) of Microsoft, succeeding Steve Ballmer in 2014 as CEO and John W. Thompson in 2021 as chairman. B ...

, which has seen a larger focus on

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

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 not-for-profit, independent corporation that is an affiliate of Harvard Business School. ''HBR'' is published six times a year ...

'' argued that Microsoft was intending to acquire GitHub to get access to its user base, so it can be used as a

loss leader A loss leader (also leader) is a pricing strategy where a product is sold at a price below its market cost to stimulate other sales of more profitable goods or services. With this sales promotion/marketing strategy, a "leader" is any popular artic ...

to encourage the use of its other development products and services. Concerns over the sale bolstered interest in competitors:

Bitbucket Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service owned by Atlassian. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts with an unlimited number of private repositories. Services Bitbucket Cloud Bitbucket Cloud (pre ...

(owned by

Atlassian Atlassian Corporation () is an Australia, Australian-United States, American proprietary software company that specializes in collaboration tools designed primarily for software development and project management. Domicile (law), Domiciled in ...

GitLab GitLab is a software forge primarily developed by GitLab Inc. It is available as a community edition and a commercial edition. History GitLab was created in 2011 by Ukrainian programmer Dmitriy Zaporozhets as a side project written in Rub ...

and

(owned by

Slashdot ''Slashdot'' (sometimes abbreviated as ''/.'') is a social news website that originally billed itself as "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It features news stories on science, technology, and politics that are submitted and evaluated by site ...

) 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.

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, sports team, university society, society, military unit, or brand, brand name. Mascots are als ...

is an anthropomorphized "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 Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales. Computer standards ...

digital image A digital image is an image composed of picture elements, also known as pixels, each with '' finite'', '' discrete quantities'' of numeric representation for its intensity or gray level that is an output from its two-dimensional functions f ...

s. 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 can be accessed and managed using the standard

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 A social network is a social structure consisting of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), networks of Dyad (sociology), dyadic ties, and other Social relation, social interactions between actors. The social network per ...

-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 application ...

called

Gollum Gollum is a Tolkien's monsters, monster with a distinctive style of speech in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy world of Middle-earth. He was introduced in the 1937 Fantasy (genre), fantasy novel ''The Hobbit'', and became important in its sequel, ' ...

), and a social network graph to display how developers work on their versions ("

forks In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from 'pitchfork') is a Eating utensil, utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with whic ...

") 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. 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

itself, written by

Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds ( , ; born 28 December 1969) is a Finnish software engineer who is the creator and lead developer of the Linux kernel. He also created the distributed version control system Git. He was honored, along with Shinya Yam ...

, creator of Linux. The additional software that provides the GitHub user interface was written using

and Erlang by GitHub, Inc. developers Wanstrath, Hyett, and Preston-Werner.

Scope

The primary purpose of GitHub is to facilitate the

version control Version control (also known as revision control, source control, and source code management) is the software engineering practice of controlling, organizing, and tracking different versions in history of computer files; primarily source code t ...

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 collab ...

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) allows

pull request In software development, distributed version control (also known as distributed revision control) is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centr ...

s to propose changes to the source code. Users who can review the proposed changes can see a diff between 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 In software distribution and software development, a README file (computing), file contains information about the other files in a directory (file systems), directory or archive (computing), archive of computer software. A form of Software doc ...

files in a variety of

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber created Markdown in 2004 as an easy-to-read markup language. Markdown is widely used for blogging and instant messaging, and also used ...

-like file formats (see ) *

Wikis A wiki ( ) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or l ...

, with some repositories consisting solely of wiki content. These include curated lists of recommended software which have become known as awesome lists. * GitHub Codespaces, an online IDE providing users with a virtual machine intended to be a work environment to build and test code * Graphs: pulse, contributors, commits, code frequency, punch card, network, members * Integrations Directory * Email notifications * Discussions * Option to subscribe someone to notifications by @ mentioning them. *

Emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

s * Nested task-lists within files * Visualization of

geospatial Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...

data * 3D render files can be previewed using an integrated STL file viewer that displays the files on a "3D canvas." The viewer is powered by

WebGL WebGL (short for Web Graphics Library) is a JavaScript Application programming interface, API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within any compatible web browser without the use of plug-in (computing), plug-ins. WebGL is fully integra ...

and Three.js. * Support for previewing many common image formats, including Photoshop's PSD files * PDF document viewer * Security Alerts of known

Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) system, originally Common Vulnerability Enumeration, provides a reference method for publicly known information security, information-security vulnerability (computing), 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 Open Source Definition'' (OSD) is a policy document published by the Open Source Initiative. Derived from the Debian Free Software Guidelines written by Bruce Perens, the definition is the most common standard for open-source software. ...

. 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 with similar functionality. It can be run on an organization's hardware or a cloud provider and has been available 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 software, free and open source software tool for Download, downloading video and audio from YouTube and over 1,000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license. As of Sep ...

. 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

In 2008, GitHub introduced GitHub Pages, a static

web hosting service A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that hosts websites for clients, i.e. it offers the facilities required for them to create and maintain a site and makes it accessible on the World Wide Web. Companies providing web h ...

for

blog A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

s, project documentation, and books. All GitHub Pages content is stored in a Git repository as files served to visitors verbatim or in

format. GitHub is 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. Like the rest of GitHub, it includes free and paid service tiers. 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 it might use the subdomain. Overview The Domain Name System ...

s of the github.io domain or can be connected to custom domains bought through a third-party

domain name registrar A domain name registrar is a company, person, or office that manages the reservation of Internet domain names. A domain name registrar must be accredited by a generic top-level domain (gTLD) Domain name registry, registry or a country code top-l ...

. GitHub Pages supports HTTPS encryption.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions was officially launched on November 13, 2019. It was first announced in October 2018 at GitHub Universe as a way to automate workflows, but the full general availability (GA) release came a year later in 2019. GitHub Actions, which allows building

continuous integration Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of integrating source code changes frequently and ensuring that the integrated codebase is in a workable state. Typically, developers Merge (version control), merge changes to an Branching (revisio ...

and continuous deployment pipelines for testing, releasing and deploying software without the use of third-party websites/platforms. Unlike many other CI/CD tools, GitHub Actions launched with a marketplace where developers could share and reuse prebuilt actions (e.g., testing, linting, deployments). GitHub wanted to reduce reliance on third-party services and keep developers within the GitHub ecosystem. GitHub Actions provided hosted runners (Linux, Windows, macOS) that could dynamically scale, eliminating the need for self-managed build servers.

Gist

GitHub also operates a pastebin-style site called Gist, which is for

code snippets Snippet is a programming term for a small region of re-usable source code, machine code, or text. Ordinarily, these are formally defined operative units to incorporate into larger Module (programming), programming modules. Snippet management is ...

, as opposed to GitHub proper, which is usually used 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 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 could upload Gists until March 19, 2018, when uploading Gists was restricted to logged-in users, reportedly to mitigate

spamming Spamming is the use of messaging systems to send multiple unsolicited messages (spam) to large numbers of recipients for the purpose of commercial advertising, non-commercial proselytizing, or any prohibited purpose (especially phishing), or si ...

on the page of recent Gists. Gists'

URL A uniform resource locator (URL), colloquially known as an address on the Web, is a reference to a resource that specifies its location on a computer network and a mechanism for retrieving it. A URL is a specific type of Uniform Resource Identi ...

s use hexadecimal IDs, and edits to Gists are recorded in a

revision history A changelog (also spelled change log) is a log or record of all notable changes made to a project. The project is often a website or software project, and the changelog usually includes records of changes such as bug fixes, new features, etc. Som ...

, 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 free access to more than a dozen 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 Bre ...

, 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, US, with 15 globally distributed data centers. DigitalOcean provides developers, ...

, DNSimple, HackHands,

Namecheap Namecheap is an American ICANN-accredited domain name registrar and web hosting company, based in Phoenix, Arizona. The company was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall and has since grown to become one of the largest independent domain registra ...

, Orchestrate, Screenhero, SendGrid, Stripe, Travis CI, and

Unreal Engine Unreal Engine (UE) is a 3D computer graphics game engine developed by Epic Games, first showcased in the 1998 first-person shooter video game '' Unreal''. Initially developed for PC first-person shooters, it has since been used in a variety of ...

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 worldwide. 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 with multiple modules to develop community leadership skills.

GitHub Marketplace service

GitHub also provides some

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a cloud computing service model where the provider offers use of application software to a client and manages all needed physical and software resources. SaaS is usually accessed via a web application. Unlike o ...

(SaaS) integrations for adding extra features to projects. Those services include: * Waffle.io: project management for software teams, which allows users to automatically see pull requests, automated builds, reviews, and deployments across repositories. * Rollbar: provides real-time debugging tools and full-stack exception reporting. * Codebeat: automated code analysis for web and mobile developers. * Travis CI:

service. * GitLocalize: provides utilities to manage project translation and internationalisation.

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 ''The Verge'' is an American Technology journalism, technology news website headquarters, headquartered in Lower Manhattan, New York City and operated by Vox Media. The website publishes news, feature stories, guidebooks, product reviews, cons ...

said that GitHub Sponsors "works exactly like

Patreon Patreon (, ) is a monetization platform operated by Patreon, Inc., that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service and sell digital products. It helps artists and other creators earn a recurring income by provid ...

" 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 can still use similar services like Patreon and Open Collective and link to their websites.

GitHub Archive Program

In July 2020, GitHub stored a February archive of the site in an abandoned mountain mine in

Svalbard Svalbard ( , ), previously known as Spitsbergen or Spitzbergen, is a Norway, Norwegian archipelago that lies at the convergence of the Arctic Ocean with the Atlantic Ocean. North of continental Europe, mainland Europe, it lies about midway be ...

, 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 from ...

and not far from the

Svalbard Global Seed Vault The Svalbard Global Seed Vault () is a secure backup facility for the world's crop diversity on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago. The Seed Vault provides long-term storage for duplicates of seeds fro ...

. 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, such as soda-lime glass, lead glass, or borosi ...

platters, using a high-precision petahertz pulse laser, i.e. one that pulses a

quadrillion Depending on context (e.g. language, culture, region), some large numbers have names that allow for describing large quantities in a textual form; not mathematical. For very large values, the text is generally shorter than a decimal numeric repres ...

(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 engaged in a pattern of

harassment Harassment covers a wide range of behaviors of an offensive nature. It is commonly understood as behavior that demeans, humiliates, and intimidates a person, and it is characteristically identified by its unlikelihood in terms of social and ...

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: Aircraft *Medium bomber, a class of warplane * Tecma Medium, a French hang glider design Arts, entertainment, and media Films * ''The Medium'' (1921 film), a German silent film * ''The Medium'' (1951 film), a film vers ...

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 (IRI) and also known as Persia, is a country in West Asia. It borders Iraq to the west, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan to the nort ...

Crimea Crimea ( ) is a peninsula in Eastern Europe, on the northern coast of the Black Sea, almost entirely surrounded by the Black Sea and the smaller Sea of Azov. The Isthmus of Perekop connects the peninsula to Kherson Oblast in mainland Ukrain ...

Cuba Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country, comprising the island of Cuba (largest island), Isla de la Juventud, and List of islands of Cuba, 4,195 islands, islets and cays surrounding the main island. It is located where the ...

North Korea North Korea, officially the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the northern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders China and Russia to the north at the Yalu River, Yalu (Amnok) an ...

, and

Syria Syria, officially the Syrian Arab Republic, is a country in West Asia located in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Levant. It borders the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Turkey to Syria–Turkey border, the north, Iraq to Iraq–Syria border, t ...

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 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 Virtual private network (VPN) is a network architecture for virtually extending a private network (i.e. any computer network which is not the public Internet) across one or multiple other networks which are either untrusted (as they are not con ...

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 Isis was a major goddess in ancient Egyptian religion whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. Isis was first mentioned in the Old Kingdom () as one of the main characters of the Osiris myth, in which she resurrects her sla ...

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 cyberattack 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 co ...

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 The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE; ) is a Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Homeland Security. ICE's stated mission is to protect the Un ...

(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

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. 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 Black Lives Matter (BLM) is a Decentralization, decentralized political and social movement that aims to highlight racism, discrimination and Racial inequality in the United States, racial inequality experienced by black people, and to pro ...

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. This form of engagement often emphasizes visibility over tangible results, focusing on symbolic gestures that align with tre ...

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 following the

January 6 United States Capitol attack On January 6, 2021, the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C., was attacked by a mob of supporters of Donald Trump, President Donald Trump in an attempted self-coup,Multiple sources: * * * * * * * * * * * * * two months afte ...

, calling some of the rioters "

Nazis Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...

". 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.

Twitter source code leak

In 2023, parts of the social media platform

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

were uploaded onto GitHub. The leak was first reported by the ''New York Times'' and was part of a legal filing Twitter submitted to the

United States District Court for the Northern District of California The United States District Court for the Northern District of California (in case citations, N.D. Cal.) is the federal United States district court whose jurisdiction comprises the following counties of California: Alameda, Contra Costa, De ...

. Twitter claimed that the postings infringed on copyright property owned by them, and asked the court for information to identify the user who posted the source code to GitHub, under the username "FreeSpeechEnthusiast".

Reception

In 2012,

, the original developer of Git, highly praised GitHub, stating, "The hosting of github 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 their 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."

References

External links

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