GitHub provides its basic services free of charge. Its professional services and the most advanced projects are commercial. Free GitHub accounts are commonly used to host open-source projects. As of January 2019, GitHub offered unlimited private repositories for all plans, including free accounts, but allowed only up to three developers per repository for free. Starting April 15, 2020, the free plan allowed unlimited developers, but restricted private repositories to 2,000 GitHub minutes per month. As of January 2020, GitHub has reported having over 40 million users and over 190 million repositories (including at least 28 million public repositories), making it the world's largest source code host.
GitHub was developed by Chris Wanstrath, Tom Preston Werner, and Scott Chacon using Ruby on Rails, and was launched in February 2008. GitHub has been around since 2007 and is headquartered in San Francisco.
History
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| github.com |
On February 24, 2009, GitHub announced that during its first year of being online, GitHub had accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, of which 17,000 had been formed in the previous month. At that time, about 6,200 warehouses were branched at least once and 4,600 warehouses were merged.
Map shading shows the number of users as a percentage of Internet users in each country. Pie charts surrounding the hemispheres show the total number of GitHub users (left) and contributions (right) for each country.
That same year, the site was used by more than 100,000 users, and according to GitHub, the site grew to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 that was forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories.
In 2010, GitHub was hosting one million repositories. A year later, that number doubled. The ReadWriteWeb blog posted that GitHub surpassed SourceForge and Google Code-in the total number of contributions for the January-May 2011 period. On January 16, 2013, GitHub surpassed the 3 million user mark by hosting over 5 million repositories. . By the end of the year, the number of warehouses was double that, reaching 10 million.
In 2012, GitHub raised $100 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz with an estimated value of $750 million. Peter Levine, the general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, stated that GitHub has been growing revenue at a rate of 300% per year since 2008 "almost profitably". On July 29, 2015, GitHub said it had raised $250 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. Other investors in that round include Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, and IVP (Institutional Venture Partners). The round valued the company at about $2 billion.
In 2016, BitHub was ranked No. 14 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. The platform was not mentioned in 2018, 2019, and 2020 lists.
On February 28, 2018, GitHub fell victim to the second-largest Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in history, with incoming traffic peaking at 1.35 Tbps.
On June 19, 2018, GitHub expanded the GitHub Education website by offering free education packages to all schools.
In early July 2020, GitHub Archive was created, to archive open-source code forever.
Offices around the world
In 2015, GitHub opened an office in Japan which is its first office outside the United States. Five years later, Jethub was launched in India under the name Jethub India Private Limited.
Acquisition by Microsoft
As of 2012, Microsoft has become a significant user of GitHub, using it to host open source development projects and tools such as the .NET kernel, Chakra Core, MSBuild, PowerShell, PowerToys, Visual Studio Code, Windows Calculator, Windows Terminal, and much of the product documentation (can now be found in Microsoft docs). On June 4, 2018, Microsoft announced its intention to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion. The transaction closed on October 26, 2018. GitHub has continued to operate independently as a community, platform, and business. Under Microsoft's management, the service was led by Nat Friedman of Xamarin, and reports to Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and artificial intelligence. GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath has been retained as a "technical fellow", also reporting to Guthrie.
There have been concerns from developers such as Kyle Simpson, a JavaScript teacher, and author, and Rafael Laguna, CEO of OpenAction, about Microsoft's purchase of GitHub, citing unease about Microsoft's handling of previous acquisitions, such as the Nokia mobile business or Skype. This acquisition was in line with Microsoft's business strategy under CEO Satya Nadala, which saw a greater focus on cloud computing services, along with open-source software development and contributions to it. Harvard Business Review argued that Microsoft intended to acquire GitHub to reach its user base so that it could be used as an incentive to encourage the use of its other development products and services.
Concerns about the sale boosted interest in competitors: Bitbucket (owned by Atlassian), GitLab (a commercial open-source product that also runs a hosted service version), and SourceForge have announced that they have seen spikes in new users intending to migrate projects from GitHub to its own services.
In March 2020, GitHub announced that it had acquired npm, a JavaScript package distributor, for an undisclosed amount. The transaction closed on April 15, 2020, and was acquired by GitHub.
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