Developers are drawn to GitHub for five practical reasons: it concentrates a huge body of shared work, makes code changes reviewable, keeps projects on an open platform, connects tools across the software lifecycle, and focuses on everyday workflow details. Microsoft agreed to acquire GitHub on June 4, 2018, and completed the deal on October 26, 2018, while promising that GitHub would remain developer-first, independent, and open.
Why do developers like GitHub?
“Love” is the headline’s shorthand, not a measured finding. The available figures show GitHub’s scale and activity, but they do not prove that all developers are satisfied or that these five factors rank equally for everyone.
1. A shared community and body of work
GitHub gives developers one widely recognized place to publish code, discover projects, document work, and find potential collaborators. Its own historical and current figures illustrate the scale:
| Measure | Figure | Qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Developer accounts | More than 31 million | GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse count as of September 30, 2018; accounts included regardless of activity. |
| Organizations | More than 2.1 million | GitHub’s 2018 count of free and paid organizations, active and inactive. |
| Repositories | More than 96 million | Historical GitHub figure as of September 30, 2018. |
| Pull requests created | More than 200 million | Cumulative figure in the 2018 Octoverse report. |
| Developers | More than 180 million | GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse figure; reporting is not directly identical to the narrower 2018 account description. |
| Repositories | 630 million | GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse figure. |
| Pull requests merged | 43.2 million per month on average | GitHub’s 2025 monthly average, not the 2018 cumulative-created measure. |
Sources: GitHub’s 2018 Octoverse and GitHub’s 2025 Octoverse. A large network does not guarantee quality or satisfaction, but it lowers the friction of finding examples, dependencies, maintainers, and established practices.
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2. Pull requests turn changes into a collaborative workflow
A pull request provides a reviewable proposal for changing code. Contributors can show a diff, discuss individual lines, request revisions, and record the eventual decision alongside the project’s history. That is useful for both open-source contributions and private team work, even though not every project uses the same process.
GitHub’s acquisition-completion announcement described creating, collaborating, sharing, and building on one another’s work as core activities, with pull requests among the workflows it sought to improve. The 2018 Octoverse’s more than 200 million pull requests created indicates extensive use, but the number alone does not measure review quality or outcomes.
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3. An open platform with room for developer choice
Microsoft’s June 4, 2018 announcement said GitHub would retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform. Microsoft repeated those commitments when the acquisition closed. GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote in the completion post, dated October 26, 2018: “We will always support developers in their choice of any language, license, tool, platform, or cloud.”
That statement matters because developers often care about portability and control: which language they use, how they license a project, which editor or service they connect, and where software runs. It was a commitment at the time of the transaction, not evidence that every later policy or product decision satisfied every developer.
4. Connections across the development lifecycle
GitHub’s developer materials describe a workflow spanning code editors, repositories, pull requests, issues, projects, Codespaces, Copilot, and deployment through GitHub Actions and Azure. In practical terms, a team can plan work, change code, review it, automate checks, and deploy without manually stitching together every stage.
These are examples of integration in Microsoft’s own product account, not proof that integration is the reason all developers choose GitHub or that GitHub requires Azure. The stated commitment to support a developer’s choice of cloud remains an important qualification. See Microsoft’s overview, “Software is a team sport”, for the lifecycle framing.
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5. Attention to everyday developer experience
In his October 2018 message, Friedman identified reliability, security, and performance as objectives and named search, notifications, issues and projects, and mobile as everyday scenarios to improve. These details speak to the less glamorous work that determines whether a platform is pleasant to use: finding a repository quickly, noticing a requested review, tracking an issue, and accessing work away from a desktop.
Those were the incoming CEO’s stated priorities, not an independent measurement of improvement. They nevertheless explain why workflow polish can matter as much as headline features to people who use a service throughout the day.
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Why did Microsoft buy GitHub?
Microsoft announced an agreement to acquire GitHub on June 4, 2018, in “Microsoft + GitHub = Empowering Developers”. The company announced completion on October 26, 2018, in “Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition”.
The public framing was an alignment around developers and software development, not a promise to turn GitHub into a closed Microsoft-only service. At closing, Microsoft and GitHub said the service would retain its developer-first ethos, operate independently, and remain an open platform. Friedman’s contemporaneous GitHub post, “Pull request successfully merged. Starting build…”, presented the same commitments and listed reliability, security, performance, and workflow improvements as priorities.
The safest interpretation is therefore limited: Microsoft bought a major developer platform and publicly committed to preserving its openness and independence while improving the experience. The announcements do not establish a single hidden motive, nor do they prove that every developer welcomed the deal.
The important counterpoint: GitHub was never all of open source
A 2021 paper surveying 246 developers in Linux and BSD communities reported that Microsoft’s acquisition prompted some communities to move away from GitHub and renewed discussion about free software. The authors explicitly cautioned that GitHub does not represent all free/libre and open-source software communities. Read that as a bounded finding about the communities studied, not evidence of broad developer rejection. The paper is available at arXiv: “FLOSS != GitHub”.
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What the evidence can—and cannot—tell you
- Scale figures show how many accounts, repositories, and contribution events GitHub reported; they do not measure affection, satisfaction, or causation.
- The five reasons describe platform characteristics and stated priorities, not a ranked survey of developer motivations.
- GitHub’s workflows are flexible conventions. A team can use repositories, issues, pull requests, or external tools in different combinations.
- Microsoft’s 2018 promises describe the intended relationship at acquisition and closing; they should not be treated as a guarantee about every subsequent decision.
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