MUMBAI : GitHub Inc., a global software development and open source code hosting platform that was acquired by Microsoft two years ago, on Wednesday launched GitHub India Private Limited.

The code-hosting platform was acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion.

“Over the past year, the number of public repositories in India has grown 75%, demonstrating a sharp increase in collaboration across the Indian developer community. In building out a local team in India, our goal is to create stronger relationships with developers and support open source development across developers, maintainers, and enterprises,” said Erica Brescia, Chief Operating Officer, GitHub in the sidelines of the NASSCOM Technology and Leadership Forum 2020.

India is home to its third-largest community of developers and so far witnessed 22% growth in the past year, he added.

Public repositories are open source software projects where developers can collaborate from all over the world.

According to the 2019 GitHub Octoverse report, more than 80% of repository contributions come from outside the US with over 40 million developers collaborating globally.

In India, a large number of new repositories are being built to harness mobile first applications, said Brescia.

“We have also partnered with Major League Hacking to offer $1000 grants to hackathons in India,” Brescia said. Hackathons are popular with technology and fintech companies both as outreach programmes as well as for talent hunting. All major Indian banks have annual hackathons to accelerate their digital presence.

GitHub’s growth strategy in the country will be spearheaded by Maneesh Sharma, general manager of India business. Over the next few months, GitHub will build a team across all functions, including community, engineering, sales, support, marketing and services, and enable its customers to adopt DevOps best practices.

GitHub is also working with a growing number of companies in India, including Swiggy and ArisGlobal.

Source:- livemint