Now, pretty much everyone hosts their open source projects on GitHub, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even Microsoft—once the bete noire of open source software. In recent months, as Microsoft open sourced some of its most important code, it used GitHub rather than its own open source site, CodePlex. S. “Soma” Somasegar—the 25-year Microsoft veteran who oversees the company’s vast collection of tools for software developers—says CodePlex will continue to operate, as will other repositories like Sourceforge and BitBucket. “We want to make sure it continues being there, as a choice,” he tells WIRED. But he sees GitHub as the only place for a project like Microsoft .NET. “We want to meet developers where they are,” he says. “The open source community, for the most part, is on GitHub.”

n 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.