Release Radar · December 2021 Edition

Many of us were wrapping up projects, emails, events, and getting ready for Christmas. While we were all busy getting ready for the festive season, our community was still hard at work shipping open source projects. Everything from big open source projects to weekend hobbies. There’s also been a lot of new projects shipped. Here’s this month’s top staff...

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Open source creates value, but how do you measure it?

Open source software has transformed our lives. Using someone else’s running code allows developers to focus efforts on unsolved problems without reinventing the wheel—accelerating innovation at scale. To developers, this is obvious. But too often, it is not as clear to policymakers. This matters, because while governments often provide public goods,...

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Reducing security risk in open source software with GitHub Actions and OpenSSF Scorecards V4

GitHub is committed to helping secure the future of open source security, and it is why we continue to partner with our industry peers through the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). Today we’re excited to announce the V4 release of the OpenSSF’s Scorecard project in partnership with Google. Scorecards is an automated security tool that flags...

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How open source is supporting NASA’s new eyes in space

“Any rich nation can build a space telescope, but only a great nation gives its information away to the world to be used for the common heritage and betterment of mankind.” – Barbara Mikulski, former Maryland State Senator Open source is the backbone of some of the greatest human achievements in technology. There’s a quiet power to open source communities...

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Top-rated entries from Game Off 2021

The results are in! Game Off, our annual game jam (hackathon for building games), finished with over 500 amazing entries this year. Last November, almost 8,000 participants were challenged to build a game with the theme “BUG,” and that spawned all sorts of creative and colorful games created with a variety of different game engines and programming...

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How five open source communities are using GitHub Discussions

TL;DR: From answering questions about a new release to fielding feature requests, here’s how five open source communities are using GitHub Discussions. Whether you’re using or contributing to an open source project, there comes a time when you have a question to ask, a bug to report, a roadmap to plan, or just about any other number of things....

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The Open Source Software Security Summit: securing the world’s code together

The world runs on software, which in turn relies on open source. In fact, 99% of the world’s software has at least some open source code in its DNA, meaning the apps and programs that power our lives reflect the hard work of open source developers. This also means that vulnerabilities in open source code can have a global ripple effect across the billions...

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How we ship GitHub Mobile every week

Every week, the GitHub Mobile team updates the GitHub Mobile apps on both iOS and Android with new features, bug fixes and improvements. Shipping a mobile app is not an easy task. Before a build goes out to our users’ hands, we must make sure the end result is properly built, all written tests are passed, and any critical issues are captured by testing....

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GitHub Availability Report: December 2021

In December, we experienced no incidents resulting in service downtime to our core services. Please follow our status page for real time updates. To learn more about what we’re working on, check out the GitHub engineering blog.

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How the community powers GitHub Advanced Security with CodeQL queries

Security alerts produced by static application security testing (SAST) tools are valuable only if they are able to drive efficient fixes and more secure code practices without slowing developers down. The authors of “What Developers Want and Need from Program Analysis: An Empirical Study”[1] found out that five key pain points of SAST tools for developers...

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