November 9-10, GitHub Universe took place, GitHub’s annual product announcements filled flagship event. Over 5 different stages, Mainstage, Cloud, Security, AI, and Community, online and in-person, Hubbers, partners and community members came together to share what’s new.

Controversial AI gets accessibility update

Rizèl Scarlett, Developer Advocate at GitHub, demo-ed GitHub’s “AI pair programmer” Copilot’s accessibility features. An experiment from GitHub Next: “Hey, GitHub!” enables voice-based interaction with Copilot, enabling the benefits of an AI pair programmer while reducing the need for a keyboard.

Also coming soon, businesses will be able to purchase and manage seat licenses for GitHub Copilot for their employees.

Not referenced in the keynote, but the class-action lawsuit against OpenAI, Microsoft, and GitHub, claims Copilot violates copyright laws. Lawyer and developer Matthew Butterick announced last month that he and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm would investigate Copilot. They wanted to know if and how the software infringed upon the legal rights of coders by scraping and emitting their work without proper attribution under current open-source licenses.

Codespaces update

April Leonard, Staff Software Engineering Manager at GitHub, introduced GitHub Codespaces’ new search and navigation functionality, allowing developers to construct queries with suggestions, offers completions, and provides the ability to slice and dice results. I signed up for the waiting list and gained access the day after: https://github.com/features/code-search-code-view/signup

At Universe GitHub made Codespaces GA, and includes up to 60 hours of Codespaces for free every month. Through our partnership with JetBrains, developers can now use the IDE of their choice on GitHub Codespaces (IntelliJ, Vim, in addition to Visual Studio Code).

JupyterLab in Codespaces is now in public beta, and GPU access to power your machine learning efforts, is in private preview.

Putting money where your mouth is

Naytri Sramek, Senior Director Strategy at GitHub, started with some data. GitHub Sponsors expanded to 68 regions, and over 35 million Dollars were donated to open source developers and projects since the start of the program. GitHub themselves supported their stack by directing 500.000 Dollars to the open source components they depend on.

Two new programs launched: the GitHub Accelerator, and the GitHub Fund in partnership with M12, Microsoft’s venture arm. Through the GitHub Accelerator, GitHub will directly fund 20 developers globally who maintain open source projects. They will receive a $20K cash stipend and mentorship from “pioneers in the open source community on how to grow their project, as well as company sponsors to understand how to build durable streams of funding”. Open source maintainers from around the world who want to pursue full-time work can apply until December 31, 2022: https://accelerator.github.com/

The GitHub Fund will award as much as $10 million. Naytri mentioned CodeSee as the first investment case. Startups who would like to be considered can contact fund@github.com

Lastly GitHub Sponsors received an update as well. GitHub Sponsors will let you support your dependencies all at once, by uploading a list of maintainers you want to support plus the amounts of the sponsorships. A bulk sponsorship feature of sorts.

GitHub’s (Project) Roadmap

Allison Weins, Senior Product Manager GitHub, demonstrated the new Roadmap view for Projects, GitHub’s planning tool. The improved Projects now goes well beyond a simple checklist, while still being all Markdown under the hood. Work items decomposed into sub-tasks can now be converted to GitHub Issues with a click. And these updates go for GitHub Mobile too, behind a sign up wall: https://aka.ms/tasklist-roadmap-signup

Security update

Brittany O'Shea, Director Product Marketing and Security at GitHub, shared how maintainers can now receive private vulnerability reports from the (security researchers) community and collaborate on a solution.

Also: for more comprehensive insights into your security risk, check out the security tab of your repository.

The Octoverse

I’ve always been a big State of the Octoverse fan, and this year celebrates 10 years of research on how communities, organizations, and companies are collaborating and investing in open source. For all data: https://octoverse.github.com/

More updates, like to GitHub Enterprise, and GitHub Actions, are easily discoverable. And all GitHub Universe sessions are now available on demand.

I bet you’ll see all these updates demo-ed at a meetup near you soon. But you don’t need to wait for that moment to start playing around with the new features yourself. And it’s always a good time to give back to open source, so definitely navigate to GitHub Sponsors!