GitHub crosses the 100 million user mark

GitHub now has over 100 million users globally and 10 million in India alone. In 2019, the company had set the goal to strike the 100 million-mark by 2025 but has now managed to achieve the target two years ahead of schedule.

“GitHub is the home of all developers. This is our vision. From creating the pull request to empowering developers with AI through GitHub Copilot, everything we do has been to put the developer first. And it’s just the beginning. With GitHub Next, our research and development team is investigating the future of software development,” the company blog said.

GitHub has emerged as the hosting service of choice for the majority of software and projects. It is arguably the most popular online software development platform and has over 300 million repositories.

The 2022 GitHub State of the Octoverse report stated that the platform gained over 20 million new users that year and is being used by 90% of the Fortune 100 companies. India’s developer growth on GitHub was the largest in 2022. As per GitHub, there are close to 10 million Indian developers on the platform, second to only the US. The company also predicted that by 2025, India will overtake the US in terms number of developers on the platform.

The code-hosting platform was launched in 2008 and acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion. In June 2021, Microsoft and GitHub, along with artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI released GitHub Copilot. An AI pair programming tool, GitHub Copilot offers code suggestions to programmers. As per a 2022 GitHub report, the surveyed developers said that the use of this AI coding tool has helped them in completing their tasks 55% faster.  In January 2023, Microsoft made its Azure OpenAI services, which also include Copilot, generally available.