Developers are drawn to GitHub for more than storing code: it brings projects and collaborators together, supports reviewable contributions, connects with tools across software development, and gives teams a shared place to work. Those are practical reasons to value the platform, not proof that every developer likes it. Microsoft agreed to acquire GitHub in 2018 and completed the deal that October; its announcements promised that GitHub would remain independent and open.
Why do developers like GitHub?
“Love” is the title’s shorthand, not a measured or universal sentiment. GitHub’s scale and feature set help explain its appeal, but the available figures measure accounts, repositories, and activity—not satisfaction or why an individual chooses the service.
1. A large shared community and body of work
A common platform makes it easier to find projects, see how they are built, and discover potential collaborators. GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse reported more than 180 million developers and 630 million repositories. Those numbers indicate scale, not that all accounts are active or that users are equally engaged. GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse report provides the current figures.
For context, GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse reported more than 31 million developer accounts, 2.1 million organizations, and 96 million repositories as of September 30, 2018. The report counted developer accounts regardless of activity and included both active and inactive free and paid organization accounts. It also reported more than 200 million pull requests created by that period. These are historical figures and should not be read as directly comparable measures of active users today. GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse explains the counts.
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2. A practical way to propose and discuss changes
Pull requests give contributors a reviewable way to propose code changes and discuss them with others before they are incorporated. That can make collaboration easier to follow than exchanging patches or decisions across disconnected channels. Projects choose their own processes, though: not every repository uses pull requests in the same way, or at all.
GitHub’s 2018 report counted more than 200 million pull requests created cumulatively by that period. Its 2025 Octoverse reported an average of 43.2 million pull requests merged per month in 2025—a different measure, for a different period. The latter figure reflects merged activity, not the number created over the platform’s history. The 2018 report and the 2025 report describe those statistics.
3. An open platform and room to choose tools
GitHub’s appeal also rests on developers being able to work across different languages, licenses, tools, platforms, and clouds rather than being required to use one stack. When Microsoft announced its acquisition agreement, it said GitHub would retain a developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform. Microsoft repeated those commitments when the acquisition closed.
Nat Friedman, GitHub CEO at completion, put the choice commitment this way: “We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.” That is a statement made at the 2018 completion, not evidence that every later product decision satisfied every developer. Friedman’s completion post records the commitment.
4. Connections across the development lifecycle
GitHub can be part of a broader workflow rather than a standalone place to store repositories. Microsoft’s developer overview describes connections among code editors, repositories, pull requests, issues, Codespaces, Copilot, and deployment to Azure through GitHub Actions. These examples show how the products can fit together; they do not establish that integration is every developer’s reason for choosing GitHub, or that GitHub requires Azure. Microsoft’s acquisition announcement separately committed to supporting developers’ choice of cloud.
Microsoft’s overview of its developer tools describes these workflow connections.
5. Attention to everyday developer work
Reliability, security, and performance matter because developers depend on the platform during routine work, not just when they publish code. In an October 2018 post, Friedman named those areas as objectives and highlighted search, notifications, issues and projects, and mobile as everyday scenarios to improve. This was the incoming CEO’s stated agenda; it is not an independent measurement of how well those areas performed or whether they later improved.
Friedman’s October 2018 post describes that agenda.
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What did Microsoft’s GitHub acquisition promise?
There are two dates to distinguish: Microsoft announced an agreement to acquire GitHub on June 4, 2018, and announced that the acquisition was complete on October 26, 2018. The completion announcement said GitHub would retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform. These were explicit commitments at the time; they do not by themselves establish how every later decision affected developers.
Microsoft’s June 4 announcement describes the agreement, while its October 26 announcement confirms completion.
Why the acquisition was not welcomed by everyone
GitHub’s scale should not be mistaken for universal acceptance, particularly among free and open-source software communities. A 2021 paper reporting a survey of 246 developers in Linux and BSD communities found that Microsoft’s acquisition prompted some communities to move away from GitHub and renewed discussion about free software. The authors caution that GitHub does not represent all FLOSS communities, so this is a bounded counterpoint—not evidence of broad developer rejection. The study, “FLOSS != GitHub: A Case Study of Linux/BSD Perceptions from Microsoft’s Acquisition of GitHub,” gives its scope and findings.
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