https://medium.com/@glokesh94/github-vs-bitbucket-vs-gitlab-d2b5c28276b0 > GitHub is a web-based version-control and collaboration platform for software developers. Microsoft, the biggest single contributor to GitHub, initiated an acquisition of GitHub for $7.5 billion in June, 2018. GitHub, which is delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business model, was started in 2008 and was founded on Git, an open source code management system created by Linus Torvalds to make software builds faster. > Git is used to store the source code for a project and track the complete history of all changes to that code. It allows developers to collaborate on a project more effectively by providing tools for managing possibly conflicting changes from multiple developers. GitHub allows developers to change, adapt and improve software from its public repositories for free, but it charges for private repositories, offering various paid plans. Each public or private repository contains all of a project’s files, as well as each file’s revision history. Repositories can have multiple collaborators and can be either public or private.