What it is and the problem it solves
GitHub is a proprietary developer platform for code creation, storage, management, and sharing. It solves the problem of coordinating distributed software development without requiring teams to run their own Git servers or build tooling from scratch.
How it works
GitHub builds on Git — written by Linus Torvalds — to add access control, issue tracking, CI, wikis, and task management. It runs as a proprietary web service built with Ruby on Rails, launched in April 2008 after development began in October 2007.
What works
Hosting scales: 46,000 public repositories in year one, 1 million in 2010, 2 million in 2011, 5 million by January 2013. The web interface, issue tracker, and fork-and-pull workflow lower barriers to contribution — especially for open source.
What does not
It does not replace Git. It does not guarantee collaboration quality. It does not enforce open source — private repos are core to its business. It does not standardise contribution norms; those emerge ad hoc.
What it changes
It shifts version control from local or self-hosted tools to a centralised, social, web-native platform. It makes pull requests, forks, and issues the default interface for collaborative coding — even for projects that predate GitHub.
Is it worth your time
Yes, if you collaborate on code: it centralises coordination for distributed teams using Git’s model. No, if you need open infrastructure — it is proprietary, and its value depends on network effects, not protocol openness.