GitHub
URL	GitHub.com
Slogan	Social Coding (for all)
Commercial?	Yes
Type of site	collaborative revision control
Registration	Required
Available language(s)	English
Owner	GitHub, Inc.
Launched	April 2008
Alexa rank	317 (September 2012])
Current status	online

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for software development projects that use the Git revision control system. GitHub offers both paid plans for private repositories, and free accounts for open source projects. As of May 2011, GitHub was the most popular open source code repository site. 
 

GitHub Inc. was founded in 2008 and is based in San Francisco, California. 

 

In July 2012, the company received $100 million in Series A funding, primarily from Andreessen Horowitz. 
 

 

Description

The site provides social networking functionality such as feeds, followers and the network graph to display how developers work on their versions of a repository.
 

GitHub also operates other services: a pastebin-style site called Gist that provides wikis for individual repositories and web pages that can be edited through a Git repository, a slide hosting service called Speaker Deck, and a web analytics platform called Gauges. 

 

As of January 2010, GitHub is operated under the name GitHub, Inc. 

 

The software that runs GitHub was written using Ruby on Rails and Erlang by GitHub, Inc. (previously known as Logical Awesome) developers Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Tom Preston-Werner.

 

Revenue model

Peter Levine, general partner at GitHub's investor Andreessen Horowitz, stated that as of July 2012, GitHub had been growing revenue at 300% annually since 2008 "profitably nearly the entire way". GitHub offers private code hosting starting at $7/month for five repositories, up to $200/month for 125 repositories. Instances of GitHub can be licensed to run on private servers inside a company's firewall under the Enterprise plans ($5000/year/20 seats). Another revenue stream is github:jobs where employers can post job offers for $450/listing. GitHub's salespersons are not paid on a commission basis, and onboarding customers were described as coming from the customer's decision rather than a sales-heavy process. 

 

Statistics

GitHub was launched in April 2008. 
 

In a talk at Yahoo! headquarters on 24 February 2009, GitHub team members announced that during the first year that GitHub was online, it accumulated 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of them in the previous month alone. At that time, about 6,200 repositories had been forked at least once and 4,600 merged. On 5 July 2009, a Github Blog post announced they reached the 100,000 users mark. 

 

In another talk delivered at Yahoo! on 27 July 2009, Tom Preston-Werner announced that the numbers had risen to 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories. In July 2010, GitHub announced that it hosts 1 million repositories. In April 2011, GitHub announced that it is hosting 2 million repositories. 

 

On 21 September 2011, GitHub announced it had reached over 1 million users. 

On 13 September 2012, on their homepage, GitHub announced it had over 2.1 million users hosting over 3.7 million repositories. 

On 19 December 2012, GitHub announced it had over 2.8 million users hosting over 4.6 million repositories  

On 16 January 2013, GitHub announced it had passed the 3 million users mark and was then hosting more than 5 million repositories.  

 

Limitations and constraints

According to the terms of service, if an account's bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average of other GitHub customers, the account's file hosting service may be immediately disabled or throttled until bandwidth consumption is reduced. In addition, while there is no hard limit, the guideline for the maximum size of a repository is one gigabyte.

 

Software releases

On February 15, 2013, GitHub released Boxen, an open source Mac environment automation tool. From the Boxen website: "Boxen is your team's IT robot. It's a dangerously opinionated framework that automates every piece of your development environment. GitHub, Inc. wrote the first version of Boxen (imaginatively called “The Setup”) to help employees start shipping on day one. It's configuration management for everyone: Designers, HR mavens, legal eagles, and developers. We believe that development is production, so we value consistency, predictability, and reproducibility over artisanal, hand-tweaked development environments."