Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
If you’re a GitHub user, but you don’t pay, this is a good week. Historically, GitHub always offered free accounts but the caveat was that your code had to be public. To get private repositories, you had to pay. Starting tomorrow, that limitation is gone. Free GitHub users now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators.
The amount of collaborators is really the only limitation here and there’s no change to how the service handles public repositories, which can still have unlimited collaborators.
This feels like a sign of goodwill on behalf of Microsoft, which closed its acquisition of GitHub last October, with former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman taking over as GitHub’s CEO. Some developers were rather nervous about the acquisition (though it feels like most have come to terms with it). It’s also a fair guess to assume that GitHub’s model for monetizing the service is a bit different from Microsoft’s. Microsoft doesn’t need to try to get money from small teams — that’s not where the bulk of its revenue comes from. Instead, the company is mostly interested in getting large enterprises to use the service.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/07/github-free-users-now-get-unlimited-private-repositories/
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday January 09 2019, @01:50PM
I have to agree with the above tinfoil hats: this seems to be more of a mind-share play to perpetuate the widespread practice of closed source coding.
🌻🌻 [google.com]