Microsoft acquired GitHub in 2018. This company was founded in 2008. It is the costliest acquisition at a price of $7.5 billion. It is a provider of internet hosting for software development and version control using Git. It is on this platform that most open source projects and collaborations happen. It is a watershed moment for open source software for Microsoft to acquire GitHub.

Git is Global Information Tracker. It keeps track of your source code history. It tracks changes in any set of files used for co-ordination among programmers collaboratively developing source code.

GitHub is a cloud-based hosting service that lets you manage Git repositories. It carries open source projects that use Git. Original Git code base is entirely written in C.

GitHub archive was introduced in July, 2020. Users browse public repositories. Only registered users can contribute content to repositories. It offers unlimited private repositories at no cost since 2019.

All core GitHub feature are free for everyone since 2020.

The fundamental software is Git itself. It is written by Linus Tovalds, creator of Linux. The additional software providing interface was written by Wanstrath, Hyett, and Preston-Werner.

GitHub’s main purpose is to facilitate version control. There are pull requests to propose changes to the source code. There are tracking aspects of software development.

Users can see the changes and approve them. It is called committing. A history of commits is kept.

The competitors of GitHub are Bitbucket, GitLab and SourceForge. Its mascot is octocat with five octopus-like arms.