# GitHub **GitHub** is the platform on which most of the world's software is written in public — founded in 2008 on the Git version-control system, bought by [[Microsoft]] for $7.5 billion in 2018, home to more than 100 million developers and to Copilot, the AI coding assistant that made it the front line of the generative-AI fight over training data and labor. It is in the vault for two reasons: as infrastructure whose politics are invisible until they are not, and as a recurring site of tech-worker activism. ## The activism record The pattern was set in **November 2019**, when GitHub renewed a $200,000 software license with [[ICE]] — small enough that CEO Nat Friedman called it "not financially material," large enough that engineers resigned over it and hundreds signed a letter calling the company complicit in family separation. Friedman's answer, that he disagreed with ICE's policy but that the agency "also handles human trafficking," and COO Erica Brescia's that denying the tool would "hurt the very people we all want to help," became the template for every platform's response since: the contract stays, the values statement is issued, the protesters leave. Microsoft's own employees repeated the cycle over its Israel military contracts in 2025. ## Why it matters here GitHub's stance — code is neutral, customers are not our business — is the ideology of infrastructure, and the second Trump term has tested it from both ends: the administration that depends on platforms like GitHub for its systems, and a developer workforce that is the most organized professional constituency against it. Copilot adds a third front, the one the [[AI Action Plan]] settled in the labs' favor: training on the commons is fair use, and the commons is on GitHub. See [[Big Tech]] and [[Silicon Valley]]. ## See Also - [[Microsoft]] · [[ICE]] · [[Big Tech]] · [[Silicon Valley]] · [[AI Action Plan]]