GitHub is founded initially as Logical Awesome in February and the website launches in April. Core parts of GitHub launch during this year, including the company blog, per-project wikis, GitHub Gist, and GitHub Pages.[1]
2009–June 2013
Continued growth and product releases
GitHub continues to release products including GitHub Enterprise, Redcarpet, and Hubot. Many companies that now regularly use GitHub—including Facebook and Google—join GitHub during this period.[2]
July 2013–September 2015
Continued growth and product releases; outreach; attacks and censorship against the site; CEO resigns
GitHub continues to launch a series of products and enhancements to existing products. For the desktop, it releases Electron, Atom, and a desktop client. In terms of outreach, it launches the Bug Bounty Program, ChooseALicense.com, GitHub Classroom, GitHub Student Developer Pack, and the GitHub Engineering blog. The GitHub website also experiences multiple attacks as well as censorship from governments. In April 2014, co-founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner resigns from the company following allegations of harassment.[3]
October 2015–present
Change in pricing model
GitHub changes its pricing model from a repository-based one to a user-based one; in the process, it introduces unlimited private repositories for all customers.[4][5]
Full timeline
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (October 2022)
Year
Month and date
Event type
Details
2005
7 April
Background
The initial version of Git, a version control system with support for data integrity,[6] is released. Git would come to power GitHub.[7]
2006
11 October
Competition
First public Git free hosting platform repo.or.cz is fully launched.[8] This came several weeks after an initial launch focusing only on public mirroring and gitweb services.[9]
GitHub team members announce, in a talk at Yahoo! headquarters, that within the first year of being online, GitHub has accumulated over 46,000 public repositories, 17,000 of which were formed in the previous month alone. At this time, about 6,200 repositories have been forked at least once and 4,600 have been merged.
GitHub completes its transition to use GitHub Flavored Markdown on the site. GitHub Flavored Markdown is a variant of the Markdown markup language.[27]
Tom Preston-Werner announces that GitHub has grown to host 90,000 unique public repositories, 12,000 having been forked at least once, for a total of 135,000 repositories.[30]
14 December
Product
The initial commit to the Semantic Versioning repository is made by Tom Preston-Werner.[31][32]
GitHub introduces Compare View, a feature that allows users to compare commits in a Git repository.[34] In July, GitHub would add support for comparing across repositories.[35]
1 July
Ruby and JavaScript become the most popular languages on GitHub, with 19% and 17% of the hosted code, respectively.[1]
24 July
Growth (repository)
GitHub hits 1 million hosted repositories. Of these repositories, 60% are regular repositories while the remaining 40% are Gists.[36][37]
12 August
Product
GitHub announces that its per-project wikis are now backed by Git. The company also releases Gollum, the software powering these wikis.[38] On the same day, Gollum is declared to be version 1.0.0.[39]
GitHub launches GitHub Enterprise. GitHub Enterprise is similar to GitHub's public service but is designed for use by large-scale enterprise software development teams where the enterprise wishes to host their repositories behind a corporate firewall.[2]
The United States Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announces that it will open source the software it writes or contracts with a third party to write. The agency decides to host its source code on GitHub.[54][55]
1 July
Financial
GitHub receives $100 million in a series of investment, primarily from Andreessen Horowitz and Tom Preston-Warner becomes CEO.[1]
The source code for the petitioning system We the People as well as the mobile apps White House for iOS and White House for Android are released on GitHub.[1]
10 September
GitHub experiences service outage due to a poor database migration.[57]
GitHub introduces ZeroClipboard to the site, which allows for copying long lines of text and hashes with a single click.[60]
7 January
Product
GitHub launches Contributions, an addition to user profile pages that shows which repositories the user has been active in, as well as a calendar of activities.[61][62]
14 January
User growth, repository growth
GitHub reaches 3 million total users. At this time, GitHub also has almost 5 million repositories.[63][64]
21 January
Censorship
GitHub is blocked in China using DNS hijacking. Confirming the block, a spokesperson for GitHub says: "It does appear that we're at least being partly blocked by the Great Firewall of China".[65] The block would be lifted on January 23, 2013 after an online protest on Sina Weibo.[66]
26 January
Censorship
GitHub users in China experience a man-in-the-middle attack in which attackers could have possibly intercepted traffic between the site and its users in China. The mechanism of the attack is through a fake SSL certificate.[67] Users attempting to access GitHub received a warning of an invalid SSL certificate, which due to being signed by an unknown authority was quickly detected.[68]
15 February
Product
GitHub open-sources Boxen, a tool that automates setting up macOS machines.[69]
GitHub moves GitHub Pages to a dedicated domain, github.io. GitHub cites security reasons for the migration: to remove "potential vectors for cross domain attacks targeting the main github.com session" and mitigate phishing attempts. This migration reserves github.com for GitHub itself.[71][72]
9 May
Userbase
United States president Barack Obama signs Executive Order 13642, "Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information". As part of this new Open Data Policy, data is released on GitHub.[73][74]
23 May
Growth (repository)
GitHub reaches 3.5 million users and 6 million repositories.[1]
31 May
Product
GitHub announces the release of Octokit, a set of client libraries for working with the GitHub API.[75]
Easel, a browser-based web design tool, announces that it has been acquired by GitHub. GitHub would announce the acquisition several days later.[87][88][89]
9 January
Product
GitHub launches their Bug Bounty Program and Chris Wanstrath becomes CEO for the second time.[90][91]
12 February
Legal
WhatsApp sends a DMCA takedown request to GitHub for alleged copyright and trademark violations.[92][93]
GitHub programmer Julie Ann Horvath alleges that founder and CEO Tom Preston-Werner and his wife Theresa engaged in a pattern of harassment against her that led to her leaving the company.[1][97]
April
Company
GitHub releases a statement denying Horvath's allegations of harassment.[3][98] However, following an internal investigation, GitHub would confirm the claims. GitHub's CEO Chris Wanstrath would write on the company blog, "The investigation found Tom Preston-Werner in his capacity as GitHub's CEO acted inappropriately, including confrontational conduct, disregard of workplace complaints, insensitivity to the impact of his spouse's presence in the workplace, and failure to enforce an agreement that his spouse should not work in the office."[99] CEO Preston-Werner would subsequently resign from the company.
6 May
Product
GitHub fully releases the source code of its text editor Atom. Previously, many of its libraries and packages were open source, but the editor itself was not.[100]
16 May
The Crunchies announces that GitHub is a winner in Best Bootstrapped Startup.[1]
GitHub announces the GitHub Student Developer Pack, which gives students access to various premium services from GitHub and other tech companies.[101][102][103]
2 December
Censorship
Roscomnadzor, Russia's regulatory agency, blocks GitHub for hosting various copies of a suicide manual. Because GitHub uses HTTPS, which encrypts data between a user's computer and GitHub, internet service providers (ISP) are forced to block the whole website instead of the pages in question. Complying ISPs included Beeline, MTS, MGTS, and Megafon. Maxim Ksenzov, the Deputy Head of the Roscomnadzor, said in a statement that the block was due to GitHub not complying with earlier takedown requests for the manual on October 10, 2014.[104] GitHub was also momentarily blocked on October 2, 2014 until the original copy of the manual was deleted.[105]
31 December
Censorship
GitHub is blocked in India (along with 31 other Websites) over pro-ISIS content posted by users.[106] On 10 January 2015, GitHub would be unblocked. Again, on 12 September 2015, GitHub would be blocked all over India.[107]
2015
28 January
Product
GitHub announces that it has doubled its maximum payout for its bounty program to $10,000.[108]
Google announces that it would be closing down Google Code on January 15, 2016.[112] Most projects on the site would enter read-only mode on August 24, 2015.[113]
GitHub launches the GitHub Engineering blog, which hosts information about GitHub's engineering practices.[122]
3 June
Company
GitHub announces the formation of GitHub Japan G.K., a subsidiary of GitHub, Inc., as well as its new office in Tokyo, Japan. This new office is the first GitHub office outside of the United States.[123][124]
25 June
Product
GitHub releases version 1.0 of its Atom text editor.[125][126]
25 July
Financial
GitHub announces it has raised $250 million in funding in a round led by Sequoia Capital. The round valued the company at approximately $2 billion.[1][127]
GitHub Universe 2015 takes place in San Francisco, California.[134] GitHub Universe is GitHub's user conference; the company would continue to host the conference in subsequent years.[135][136]
1 October
Product
GitHub announces a partnership with Yubico to allow YubiKey authentication on the GitHub website.[137]
3 December
Userbase
Apple open-sources its programming language Swift and hosts it on GitHub.[138] This also marks the beginning of Apple using GitHub, as the company did not host anything on GitHub prior to this.[139][140]
2016
28 January
Growth (repository)
At this time, there are over 29 million repositories on GitHub.[43]
28 March
Growth (user)
GitHub announces that Atom, a text editor it created, has hit 1 million monthly active users.[141] GitHub knows this number because Atom comes with a package called metrics that tracks usage information using Google Analytics and sends it to GitHub.[142]
5 April
Company
GitHub announces Spokes (called Distributed Git or DGit at the time), GitHub's application-level replication system for Git, which makes GitHub more resilient to server outages.[143][144][145]
↑ Tom Preston-Werner (October 19, 2008). "GitHub Turns One!". GitHub. Retrieved February 20, 2022.
↑ Chris Wanstrath (February 22, 2008). "The Blog Arrives". GitHub. Retrieved March 1, 2017.
↑ Catone, Josh (24 July 2008). "GitHub Gist is Pastie on Steroids". GitHub hosts about 10,000 projects and officially launched in April of this year after a beta period of a few months.
1 2 Nadia Eghbal (January 28, 2016). "We're in a brave, new post open source world". Medium. Retrieved March 1, 2017. In 2011, there were 2 million repositories on GitHub. Today, there are over 29 million. GitHub's Brian Doll noted that the first million repositories took nearly 4 years to create; getting from nine to ten million took just 48 days.
↑ Rob Sanheim (January 16, 2013). "Three Million Users". GitHub. Retrieved February 23, 2017. Monday night, on the very first day of our all-hands winter summit this week, the three millionth person signed up for a GitHub account.
↑ James Pearce (December 20, 2013). "2013: A Year of Open Source at Facebook". Facebook Code. Facebook. Retrieved February 28, 2017. On our GitHub account alone, we now have more than 90 repos comprising over 40,000 commits and that have collectively been forked 15,000 times.
↑ "About". GitHub. Archived from the original on December 22, 2013. Retrieved March 1, 2017. Hubbernauts 234
↑ Kristin Burnham (October 15, 2015). "How (and why) to start a bug bounty program". Computerworld Hong Kong. Retrieved February 25, 2017. Shawn Davenport, VP of security at GitHub, launched the company's bug bounty program a year and a half ago, but the time it took to get there was much longer, he says.
↑ Frederic Lardinois (May 6, 2014). "GitHub Open Sources Its Atom Text Editor". TechCrunch. Retrieved February 23, 2017. Today, after 10 weeks in public beta, it is making all of the editor available under the MIT open source license, including all of the packages and libraries that make allow it to support different programming languages.
↑ "A hackable text editor for the 21st Century". Atom. Retrieved February 25, 2017. In the same way that aggregate usage information is important when developing a web application, we've found that it's just as important for desktop applications. By knowing which Atom features are being used the most, and how the editor is performing, we can focus our development efforts in the right place.
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