GitHub

What GitHub is

GitHub describes itself as "the complete developer platform to build, scale, and deliver secure software," and its About page lists more than 225 million developers using it ^[3]. In practice a platform of this kind hosts the repositories where source code lives, keeps a record of changes to that code, and gives teams a shared place to review each other's work and track what still needs doing. Because so much software is written collaboratively, a service that holds those repositories becomes a meeting point for programmers rather than a mere storage locker: it is where projects are published, discussed and handed on to the next person.

The Microsoft acquisition

In 2018 Microsoft agreed to acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock ^[1]. The announcement stressed continuity rather than absorption: Microsoft said GitHub would retain its developer-first ethos and operate independently ^[1], and that the deal was expected to close by the end of the calendar year ^[1].

The acquisition was completed on 26 October 2018 ^[2]. Alongside the closing, Nat Friedman, former CEO of Xamarin, took over as GitHub's CEO ^[2]. The pairing was unusual in scale — one of the largest software companies taking over the central public workspace of the developers it sells tools to — and the promise of independent operation was the answer offered to users who worried that the platform's culture would change under new ownership.

GitHub Copilot

GitHub launched a technical preview of GitHub Copilot on 29 June 2021 ^[5]. The tool was developed in collaboration with OpenAI and powered by OpenAI Codex ^[5], a model trained on code. GitHub now describes Copilot as "an AI coding agent that helps you write, understand, and ship software" ^[4].

That description marks a shift in what a code platform is for. Earlier such services held code that people had already written; an assistant of this kind sits inside the writing itself, proposing lines, explaining unfamiliar code and helping move a change towards release. Putting that capability directly into the place where developers already keep and share their work meant that a very large existing audience met generative AI through a tool aimed at their daily tasks.

Where it sits

GitHub's position comes from two things at once. It is infrastructure: the place where a large share of the world's open and private code is stored, so that developers meet it whether or not they chose it. And it is a product line that Microsoft has extended rather than replaced, keeping the developer-first framing and independent operation announced at the time of the deal ^[1]. The Copilot preview of 2021 ^[5] showed how that combination could be used: an installed base of hundreds of millions of developers ^[3] as the audience for a new class of AI-assisted programming tools.