GitHub is definitely one of the most popular hosting services for source code projects, and this has been confirmed by the fact that it currently hosts one million projects. This announcement has been made public by Scott Chacon, VP of Research and Development of GitHub, while also mentioning that about 60 percent of these entries are complete repositories, i.e. projects containing several folders containing the source code, whereas 40 percent of the projects are so-called ‘gists,’ namely short code snippets stored in one item.

Since its launch in February 2008, GitHub has been constantly growing even though it has not followed the traditional methods of venture capital funding. Consequently, the company has declared that they are “funding free and very profitable” while also seeing “incredible growth for GitHub and Git usage in general.”

It seems that the source of their financial profit resides in the paid accounts that enable developers and third-party organization to host their projects privately on GitHub servers. Considering code repository service is meant to encourage open source projects and hosts this type of projects with no cost, a paid subscription is required for those who want private hosting.

As time passed and GitHub became more popular and more profitable, the service featured support for fifteen additional languages that were meant to assist developers from all over the world to manage their projects with more ease.

GitHub is not only a successful bootstrapped startup, it has also grown to be a valuable component of the software development ecosystem, since it hosts multiple types of projects, such as Ruby on Rails, the jQuery JavaScript library or the Linux kernel.

Furthermore, developers have the liberty to choose the programming language that suits their necessities best, so that even though Ruby accounts for 19 percent of the repositories and JavaScript for 17 additional percent, the remaining projects are written in more than 50 languages as chosen by developers.