GitHub Is Microsoft’s $7.5 Billion Undo Button

Oh, GitHub, we knew ye … pretty well, actually, over the past decade. At least programmers did. To us you’ve been comically unavoidable, from your “Octocat” mascot to the fake, fully furnished Oval Office at your San Francisco headquarters, complete with a special Octocat-emblazoned rug that proclaimed “United Meritocracy of GitHub.” Of course, that rug came up a lot when people debated the concept of meritocracy. And part of the reason they were debating it was the internal investigation into “sexual or gender-based harassment or retaliation” that led one of your co-founders to resign (your investigation found “no evidence to support the claims” but did uncover “mistakes and errors of judgment”). The company seemed to normalize after that, though we also knew you’d been looking for a new boss for a while. Congrats on your $7.5 billion purchase by Microsoft Corp.!

To civilians, it can be baffling what in God’s name GitHub Inc. does or why it’s worth so much. The key thing to understand is that git is free software and GitHub makes it easier to use that software. Git keeps track of changes in sets of files. The first version, written by Linux creator Linus Torvalds, was released in 2005.