Github

Yes, Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018 for approximately $7.5 billion in an all-stock deal. GitHub continues to operate as an independent developer platform under Microsoft's ownership, serving developers across all ecosystems including those built on competing tools and cloud providers.

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered coding assistant that integrates directly into code editors and suggests completions, writes entire functions, and helps developers ship code faster. It represents GitHub's flagship AI product and sits at the center of their positioning as an AI-powered developer platform. Copilot is trained on public code and supports most major programming languages.

GitHub Universe is GitHub's annual developer conference where the company unveils major product announcements, new features, and its vision for the future of software development. It draws developers, open source maintainers, and enterprise engineers from around the world and consistently generates significant buzz in the developer community each year.

GitHub offers a free tier that includes unlimited public and private repositories for individual developers, making it accessible to students and hobbyists. Paid plans — Team and Enterprise — unlock advanced collaboration features, enhanced security tooling, audit logs, and priority support for organizations building at scale.

The GitHub Student Developer Pack gives verified students free access to GitHub's paid features along with dozens of partner tools covering cloud credits, domain registration, developer software, and more. It's GitHub's way of making professional-grade development infrastructure available to people who are still learning to code before they enter the workforce.

GitHub Actions is GitHub's built-in CI/CD and workflow automation tool that lets teams automatically test, build, and deploy software directly from their repositories. Developers write workflows triggered by events like a pull request or a merge, eliminating the need for a separate third-party automation service in many cases.

GitHub Sponsors is a program that lets developers and companies financially support open source maintainers directly on GitHub, with GitHub covering payment processing fees. It connects the people who build widely-used open source software with the individuals and organizations whose projects depend on it, bringing funding inside the platform where the code already lives.

GitHub was founded in 2008 by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, PJ Hyett, and Scott Chacon. The platform grew rapidly into the dominant home for open source collaboration before Microsoft acquired it a decade later in 2018.

GitHub has reported well over 100 million registered developers worldwide, making it the largest source code hosting and collaboration platform on the planet. The platform hosts hundreds of millions of repositories spanning virtually every programming language and industry.

A pull request is the mechanism GitHub developers use to propose code changes, have teammates review them, and merge them into a shared codebase. It sits at the heart of collaborative software development on GitHub and is one of the platform's most-used features — so central that GitHub uses #pullrequest as one of its signature content hashtags.