Do we like them?

Do we like GitHub?

Code-hosting and developer platform (Git, Copilot AI coding tool), based in San Francisco, owned by Microsoft.

Our score: 6 out of 10. Backbone of open-source software and mostly a useful, fair-priced service. But it has lost its independence, had reliability problems, and had a 2026 breach. Back it, with caveats.

GitHub is where much of the world's software lives. Microsoft bought it in 2018 for $7.5bn. It has grown a lot: one 2026 explainer says it hosts over 500 million repositories and serves more than 150 million developers.

In August 2025 CEO Thomas Dohmke said he was leaving to start a new company. Reports say Microsoft isn't naming a replacement. GitHub's leaders now report into Microsoft's CoreAI group under Jay Parikh, so it is much less independent.

May 2026 was rough. GitHub confirmed an employee's device was compromised through a poisoned VS Code extension. About 3,800 internal repositories were accessed. The group TeamPCP claimed it and reportedly tried to sell the data. GitHub said customer repositories weren't affected.

Copilot has had its own drama. A copyright class action from 2022 over training on open-source code has reportedly seen most claims dismissed, with some still alive. In 2025 an incident monitor logged a Copilot remote-code-execution flaw, CVE-2025-53773.