GitHub is Now Being Used by Over 100 Million Developers

GitHub announced this week that it’s now being used by more than 100 million developers. The company said four years ago that it aimed to reach this milestone by 2025, but it managed to do that two years earlier than expected.

“This not only puts us two years ahead of schedule, but represents a huge responsibility for us at GitHub to continue putting developers first,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke about the new milestone.

GitHub was founded back in 2008, and Microsoft acquired the company 10 years later for $7.5 billion. GitHub continues to operate independently and the company hit $1 billion of annual recurring revenue last year.

While Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub had to face some pushback from developers, GitHub has remained the most popular online software development platform with 330+ million repositories and 90% of Fortune 100 companies using it.

“As the home for 100 million developers and counting, we take our responsibility seriously to help bring more new developers into technology and help people work together to build the next great thing, accelerate human progress, and solve problems we don’t yet understand,” Dohmke said.

GitHub launched Copilot last year, a new AI-powered tool designed to help developers to write code. GitHub Copilot uses technology from OpenAI, the AI research company that just received a multibillion-dollar investment from Microsoft. However, a class-action lawsuit filed in a US Federal Court in November claimed that GitHub Copilot “relies on unprece­dented open-source soft­ware piracy.”

While the lawsuit is still in its early stages, it raises the question of who owns the code created by an AI. “We’ve been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start, and will continue to evolve the product to best serve developers across the globe,” a Microsoft spokesman said in a statement in response to the lawsuit.

Despite the legal questions around GitHub Copilot, the company says that it will continue to work on providing the best software development tools for developers. GitHub Next is the current home for new prototype tools such as Code Brushes, a new toolbox of brushes available with the Copilot Labs Visual Code extension.