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Is GitHub for Windows open source? If so, I can't seem to find the repository.
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GitHub Desktop is an open source tool that enables you to be more productive. GitHub Desktop encourages you and your team to collaborate using best practices with Git and GitHub. Just a few of the many things you can do with GitHub Desktop are: Add changes to your commit interactively.
The hosted service GitHub.com is free for open source projects and it has fundamentally improved open source collaboration. But the software GitHub's service is based on is closed source.
If you don't already have a GitHub login, head over to the signup page and create a new (free) account. Once you successfully sign in, you are ready to start using GitHub Desktop (Figure A).
Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous creator of the Linux operating system kernel. A staggering number of software projects rely on Git for version control, including commercial projects as well as open source.
According to Tom Preston-Werner, one of the GitHub founders, in his post "Open Source (Almost) Everything", about the open-sourcing philosophy
Don't open source anything that represents core business value. [...] Notice that everything we keep closed has specific business value that could be compromised by giving it away to our competitors. Everything we open is a general purpose tool that can be used by all kinds of people and companies to build all kinds of things.
However, Hubot, previsouly a closed-source asset of GitHub, was eventually open-sourced in late 2011.
For the past year or so we've been telling people about Hubot [...] So we decided to rewrite him from scratch, open source him, and share him with everyone.
Currently, the Windows Github client is not an open source software... but who knows, it might be open-sourced one day.
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Phil Haack (who currently works at GitHub) gave a hint in his blog comments to this effect:
At the moment, it is not open source. Many of the libraries we created are open source. As we polish up more and more of those libraries, we'll release more components we used to make the app.
So no, the application is not open source, but keep a look out for some parts of it being published on GitHub. (But bear in mind that this is just a blog comment, not an official announcement of any kind).
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