There are two ways to describe Github. It is the “Google drive for code” & it is the “social network for programmers”
GitHub is the largest web-based code sharing & project development management platform in the world. Their value proposition is that ‘anybody can host their software code on GitHub’s servers, & collaborate on it by multiple developers, teams, and organizations.’
Their revenue model is a freemium model. They offer free unlimited public repositories (or folders). And for private repositories, better organisational tools & customization, you can pay a subscription fee.
Before GitHub, if you wanted to contribute to an open source project you had to manually download the project’s source code, make your changes locally, create a list of changes called a “patch” and then e-mail the patch to the project’s maintainer. The maintainer would then have to evaluate this patch, possibly sent by a total stranger, and decide whether to merge the changes.
Three key features changed this with Github — fork, pull request and merge. Fork meant to copy a source code repository & then modify it under your own account. You would then share your new repo using a ‘pull request’ with the original owner. Additionally with GitHub, when you submit a pull request, the owner can see your profile along with your past contributions & work. This feature makes it a ‘social network for programmers’ And finally the owner can then easily ‘merge’ your changes with the original.
GitHub was recently acquired by Microsoft for 7.5Billion dollars.
[Read Techcrunch’s article here on ‘What is GitHub?’]
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From the desk of Aditya Khanduri
About me (Why I started Polygyan)
