"As GitHub approaches 700 employees, with more than $200M in ARR, accelerating growth, and more than 20 million registered users, I'm confident that this is the moment to find a new CEO to lead us into the next stage of growth. ....."
The Original Analysis
In 2013, a Redmonk blogger claimed that the growth of GitHub (GH) users follows a certain type of diffusion model called Bass diffusion. Here, growth refers to the number of unique user IDs as a function of time, not the number project repositories, which can have a high degree of multiplicity.
In a response, I tweeted a plot that suggested GH growth might be following a power law, aka scale free growth. The tell-tale sign is the asymptotic linearity of the growth data on double-log axes, which the original blog post did not discuss. The periods on the x-axis correspond to years, with the first period representing calendar year 2008 and the fifth period being the year 2012.
