• GitHub has reached 150 million developers and launched 'GitHub Copilot Free' in Visual Studio Code.
• Copilot Free offers developers access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month.
• India, with over 17 million developers, is the fastest-growing developer community on GitHub.
• GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, predicts India will surpass the US to become the world's largest developer community by 2028.

GitHub, the Microsoft-owned developer platform, has announced a significant milestone, surpassing 150 million developers on its platform. This achievement is a testament to the platform's growing influence in the global developer community. The announcement was made alongside the launch of 'GitHub Copilot Free' in Visual Studio Code (VS Code), a new feature that integrates seamlessly with a user's GitHub account.

GitHub Copilot Free is designed to enhance the productivity of developers, offering them access to 2,000 code completions and 50 chat messages per month. This feature is accessible simply by signing in with a personal GitHub account or creating a new one. The introduction of Copilot Free is a continuation of GitHub's tradition of supporting the developer ecosystem with free tools and services.

Over the years, GitHub has introduced a variety of free features to its platform, starting with free public repositories for open-source collaboration. This was later expanded to include free private repositories, complimentary GitHub Actions minutes, Codespaces, and free storage for packages and releases.

Empowering Developers with Copilot Free

The new Copilot Free feature gives developers the choice between Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet or OpenAI's GPT-4o model. According to GitHub, developers can use these models to ask a coding question, explain existing code, or find a bug. Users can also execute edits across multiple files, and access Copilot's third-party agents or build their own extension.

Additionally, Copilot Chat is now directly available from the GitHub dashboard and works with Copilot Free, so all developers can start using it today. This development is reminiscent of the rise of open-source software in the early 2000s, where platforms like SourceForge played a crucial role in fostering a global community of developers.

Just as SourceForge was instrumental in the early days of open-source, GitHub is now playing a similar role in the era of AI and machine learning, providing a platform for developers to collaborate, learn, and innovate.

India's Booming Developer Community

India, with over 17 million developers building on the platform, represents a significant portion of GitHub's user base. This figure represents an increase of 28 per cent in 2024, making India the fastest-growing developer community in the world. India is also the second-largest developer community contributing to public generative AI projects on GitHub, just behind the US, with a 79 per cent increase from last year.

The country saw a 95 per cent year-over-year (YoY) growth in contributions to these projects, placing itself third globally, after the US and Hong Kong. GitHub CEO, Thomas Dohmke, expressed optimism about India's booming developer community. He stated, "With GitHub Copilot Free in VS Code, India can accelerate the timeline forward to becoming the largest developer community in the world. But only if we make it happen."

Dohmke further noted that India's booming developer community is using AI to build AI in record numbers, making it evermore likely that the next great multinational will come from India. The company predicts that India will surpass the US to become the world's largest developer community by 2028.