GitHub

GitHub launched in April 2008, built on the Git version-control system that Linus Torvalds created. Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, Tom Preston-Werner, and Scott Chacon founded the company in San Francisco, writing the web interface with Ruby on Rails and Erlang. Microsoft acquired GitHub in June 2018 for $7.5 billion in stock, part of Satya Nadella's push into cloud computing and open source. Today the platform hosts over 100 million developers and hundreds of millions of repositories, making it the biggest source code host on the planet.

GitHub offers distributed version control, pull requests for code review, issue tracking, project boards, and GitHub Actions for CI/CD. The Free Plan gives unlimited public and private repositories with 2,000 CI/CD minutes per month. The Team Plan costs $4 per user per month and adds 3,000 minutes, code owners, and protected branches. Enterprise starts at $21 per user per month with SAML single sign-on, advanced auditing, and Azure cloud deployment. Add-ons like GitHub Copilot moved to usage-based billing in June 2026, which drew criticism from users who saw their costs spike.

The platform has become a social network for programmers. Open-source projects from Linux to React live here, and developers collaborate across time zones through forks, pull requests, and issues. GitHub Pages lets anyone host static sites for free, and GitHub Codespaces provides cloud development environments starting at $0.18 per hour. The United States accounts for 55% of GitHub's customer base, followed by the UK, Canada, Brazil, Australia, France, and Germany. Most customers are small teams with fewer than ten employees. [edit]