[alliecat]

This makes me uncomfortable.

Private subscriptions were a direct revenue stream for Github, and explained directly how they can afford the infrastructure that provides the service.

Generally when previously paid stuff becomes free, it's because the paid service is no longer a product - it's now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?

[dragonwriter]

The private repositories are limited to three collaborators. I think most people who would pay for private repos rather than simply use them as a factor in selecting among free hosts are going to need more collaborators than that before long (if not immediately).

Meanwhile, if people that just don't want to share their solo tinkerings focus on Gitlab or Bitbucket free plans for the private repos, then when they are ready to move up, GitHub is in a worse position to try to monetize them than if they were already in the GH ecosystem.

[ufmace]

They're now owned by Microsoft. Critical difference between Microsoft and Google - Microsoft makes all of their money from direct sales and enterprise contracts for their primary products, including Windows, Windows Server, SQL Server, ActiveDirectory, Office, etc, while Google makes their money from selling ads to you with as much targeting information as possible. So this is now a loss leader for Microsoft, primarily to draw your attention to their primary products, and any money it makes or loses is on too small of a scale for Microsoft to care probably.

There's plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren't trying to gather boatloads of info about you, just keep you buying Microsoft software.

Now that I think about it like that, maybe Google is infact becoming more evil than Microsoft.

[kyrra]

(disclaimer, I work for Google, opinions are my own)

Depends on the product you are using and what kind of data you're talking about. For Google, GSuite (the old Google Apps and GCP) are more business focused and don't really capture data about you. Free-tier products will gather more data to better target ads to you or to provide useful features.

For Microsoft, they do try to sell you products... but you have to look at other products where they do gather data on you. I'm not sure what kind of data they get out of Bing and outlook.com/Hotmail. Then you have LinkedIn, which is all kinds of data gathering (though more Facebook style).

It's sort of hard to give blanket statements about many of the large tech companies, as they have multiple divisions and products that operate differently depending on the target markets.

[szggzs27]

Agreed but I hesitate conclude that Microsoft wouldn't care about making some extra buck by placing ads. The amount of crap I've seen with windows 8 and 10 was disgusting

[klodolph]

> Generally when previously paid stuff becomes free, it's because the paid service is no longer a product - it's now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?

Does anyone remember how Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018? This is part of Microsoft's strategy now. Microsoft cares about developers using their platforms. Getting people hooked early on their ecosystem is part of that strategy. GitHub is now a part of that ecosystem. My prediction is that Visual Studio is going to get tied closer and closer to GitHub, that a lot of people are going to learn how pull requests work because of Visual Studio integration with GitHub.

Microsoft then turns around and sells GitHub + Visual Studio to software development firms, along with Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, MSDN subscriptions, etc. Managers won't hesitate to buy it because all of their employees already know how to use GitHub and love it.

[jswrenn]

Github's team pricing is per-user and non-negligible: https://github.com/pricing

[jbourne]

As mentioned in the article, this only applies to repositories with a handful of collaborators and as such organisations with private repos will still need to pay a subscription.

GitHub enterprise will also continue to provide a revenue stream.

[gmueckl]

Random, entirely baseless speculation: they want all to put all your code to do machine learning on. Seems like ML based code checking and refactoring tools are slowly becoming a thing. Imagine an assistant that tells you something like "what you are writing right now might be bad code because 80% of similar instances were later modified based on bug reports and this is how that would look like for your code"

[_emacsomancer_]

So maybe we should create a bunch of private Github repos and fill them with spurious 'good code' and spurious 'bad code'?

[thin-izzy]

That would be cool. Microsoft has already made a plugin for Visual Studio that trains on your code to improve IntelliSense code completion.

[sftwds]

Teams with more than 3 people will still need to buy a subscription:

>Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators apiece. So, while this might work for a small project (like, for example, a team competing in a hackathon), it isn’t particularly well-suited for actual commercial usage.

[globetrotter33m]

Think of it as marketing expense to attract people that went to Bitbucket and Gitlab. A % of these users will convert to a paid plan. No need to get concerned here.

[tonyedgecombe]

How will users be monetised now?

Selling Azure services.

[gknoy]

My guess is that Enterprise licensing is a much larger pool of revenue than individual users.