GitHub passes 3 million users milestone

GitHub, the code sharing site based around Linus Torvald's distributed version control system Git, has announced that the service now has over three million registered users. The commercial service, which was founded in 2008, reached the one million user milestone in September 2011 and, less than a year later, in August 2012, the company reported reaching two million users. That GitHub has reached this third milestone in under half a year shows both its, and Git's, rapidly rising popularity with developers.

GitHub extends Torvald's tool with a range of collaboration features and offers free-of-charge hosting for open source projects. The Linux kernel developers used the service as their main collaboration platform for several weeks in 2011 when the kernel.org site was out of service following a hacker attack. GitHub sells the ability to create private repositories for proprietary software and also offers a GitHub Enterprise service that allows customers to install their own local version of the software.

Last July, the company raised $100 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz. Many prominent open source software projects such as jQuery, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Joomla use the service and it has been used for such diverse things as serving the code for web sites and serving as a backend for the file transfer tool SparkleShare.

(fab)