GitHub was founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon in San Francisco. The platform was built to make Git — the distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds — accessible and collaborative. GitHub added a social layer on top of Git: profiles, pull requests, issues, stars, and forks.
Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, a move that initially worried the open-source community but has generally been viewed positively since. Under CEO Thomas Dohmke, GitHub has continued to operate independently while benefiting from Microsoft’s resources.
GitHub hosts over 420 million repositories and serves over 100 million developers — making it the largest source code hosting platform in the world. Nearly every significant open-source project lives on GitHub: Linux, React, TensorFlow, VS Code, Kubernetes, and millions more.
GitHub Copilot, launched in 2022 in partnership with OpenAI, was one of the first mainstream AI coding assistants. Copilot suggests code completions in real time within code editors and has amassed millions of paying subscribers. It’s become a significant revenue driver for GitHub.
Beyond code hosting, GitHub offers Actions (CI/CD), Packages (artifact registry), Security (Dependabot, code scanning, secret scanning), Codespaces (cloud development environments), and Projects (project management). GitHub Advanced Security brings these tools together for enterprise customers.
Headquartered in San Francisco with a remote-first workforce, GitHub employs over 3,000 people. The platform is free for public repositories and individual developers, with paid plans for teams and enterprises that need private repos and advanced features.
