INTRODUCTION

GitHub, a US company launched in April 2008, hosts a digital space where people can work on developing computer codes with others and share knowledge and skills about software. Today, GitHub is home to over 65 million developers, more than 3 million organisations, and in excess of 200 million code repositories (GitHub 2021). Individuals, groups, small start-up businesses and corporations can access on a mostly free basis these software codes, along with project spaces, code libraries and forums. Those utilising these resources and working with and on them must also ensure that they remain publicly available. According to its chief strategy officer, Julio Avalos, GitHub successfully demonstrates that the gap between ‘enterprise versus consumer is going away’ (cited in Peterson 2017). Avalos is alluding to one of the key ingredients of GitHub's steady growth. Software developers are encouraged to learn more about codes and increase their skills by working with others through GitHub. This, it is hoped, will lead companies and corporations to hire developers they have worked with on GitHub. To capitalise on this relationship between developers and corporations, GitHub introduced a fee service in the guise of GitHub Enterprise. For a price, corporations can get private accounts, host GitHub's platform on their own servers, get 24/7 support, and can also pay to keep their code private. Corporations can now also store work developed through GitHub onto cloud services. As Peterson reports:

GitHub is an interesting example because it highlights some of the themes to be discussed in this chapter and throughout the book. First, GitHub alerts us to how people across the world can share their creative ideas and skills within a community in order to produce a good that, in most cases, is also publicly available to others and, subsequently, also open to common knowledge. Secondly, and related to the previous point, it focuses attention on practices of digital platform labour at work. In this instance, we see skilled digital labour working on software, but also working in many different spaces – at home, for corporations, in different networks and so on.