Confusingly it is also dated on the 5th making it look like it should have been announced yesterday...

I would&#x27;ve deleted it as soon as you noticed. Might not have stopped people from noticing (nothing on the internet is ever deleted blah blah), but might have improved the optics a bit.

GitHub should publish the post today after noticing this and remove the embargo for other publications.

The news is now public.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;m the author of this post. The article has been updated to clarify that I accidentally published it one day before the embargo lifted. GitHub will formally announce the news tomorrow.

Too bad HN doesn&#x27;t allow following users. :-D

Does anyone have a source for this news beyond the TNW article that&#x27;s being shared everywhere? I couldn&#x27;t find any official announcement from GitHub.

Private repos with maximum of 3 collaborators are now allowed.

I wonder if they reached out to GitHub to see if they felt it was alright to keep this up? Might be good if the author could clarify! Either way, really cool news.

On the other hand, it&#x27;s also &quot;Oops, GitHub will never give us an embargoed announcement again, and a lot of other companies will probably follow suit.&quot;

Are there usually ramifications for leaking stories early like this?Would GitHub be peeved if another source published this before their official PR statement?

This genuinely seems like an accident judging by the authors Tweets: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewhughes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;matthewhughes</a>

&quot;Oops&quot; we got a big industry exclusive. Our bad guys!

It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how aggressive they are in trying to gain market share by putting off profitability improvements for the Github business. $40b in operating income and $135b in cash, they can certainly afford to play the long game if it makes sense competitively.

<pre><code> &gt; there&#x27;s no reason for me to keep my subscription...
</code></pre>
Perhaps, we&#x27;ll see. Github hasn&#x27;t actually announced the details yet. All we got is a story from a journalist who accidentally spilled the beans early.Could be totally wrong, but I expect there may be some incentive to induce folks to keep their paid plan.

Yup, this will mean that there&#x27;s no reason for me to keep my subscription as well.This will also make me a little more cautious as a consumer, since they&#x27;re voluntarily removing the incentive for me to pay for their services upfront.

Microsoft doesn’t need thanking. It’s not a mom and pop shop.GitHub also doesn’t live in a vacuum and this is likely not puuuurely done out of the goodness of MS’s heart. There may have been some strategy wrt gitlab and bitbucket taken into consideration. Dare I say... competition?I don’t doubt their goodwill, but let’s not pretend the market is about that for MS.Edit—ah I now see the “thank you” in parent’s post. Ok disregard this, then. Totally fair. I’m dumb. :)

I don&#x27;t thank for profit companies. They should thank me.

Did they just cut off a significant source of revenue, or do companies that subscribe to Enterprise make them so much more money that it doesn’t matter?

I currently am on the $7&#x2F;mo plan for myself (5 private repos I think) - I presume for users this benefits, there&#x27;s no need to cancel anything.

&gt; Well, if true -- I&#x27;ll be canceling my subscription :D
&gt; Thank you Github &#x2F; Microsoft!What a weird way to thank a company. I get it, but still.

You&#x27;re very welcome. Also see my comment <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18848267" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18848267</a>

thank you gitlab for providing market competition forcing github to consider this!

I&#x27;ve been transferring everything over to others for a while now, so this could be in response to a general trend in that direction.

This was the reason I chose gitlab over GitHub.But now that I&#x27;m on gitlab, I&#x27;m finding I like it better mainly because of the docker-based continuous integration feature. Managing contributors and 2FA without all that &quot;organization&quot; cruft is handy too.

Well, if true -- I&#x27;ll be canceling my subscription :DThank you Github &#x2F; Microsoft!&gt; Due to a scheduling error, we published this story one day before the embargo lifted. This feature isn’t live yet, but Github will formally unveil it tomorrow. When that happens, we’ll update this post with a link to the official announcement.Also... kinda unfair to others.

And, on a numeric keypad, the 5 is directly below the 8, supporting the typo hypothesis. Tweets from the author:&gt; Oh fuck me.&gt; I just accidentally published a major piece of news one day early because I&#x27;ve got butterfingers and typed the wrong number in the scheduler.&gt; Is it too early to start drinking?&gt; Wordpress is fucking stupid. If you schedule something for \in the past\* it should say &quot;er, are you sure?&quot; instead of just immediately publishing the post.*What I find most interesting about the fiasco is that TheNextWeb.com&#x27;s editorial process consists of the stock Wordpress &quot;Schedule a post&quot; function [1] which includes this lovely tidbit:&gt; Tip: Always double check the date at the top of this calendar before clicking publish, and verify that it correctly says AM or PMTrying it out in a test instance of Wordpress, he&#x27;s correct: The initial status of a new post is &quot;publish immediately.&quot; [2] Clicking &quot;Edit&quot; brings up a date editor. [3] And &quot;OK&quot; doesn&#x27;t warn you if your date is in the past. [4] Finally, clicking the &quot;Publish&quot; (which could read &quot;Schedule&quot;) generates a post with the URL &#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F; that&#x27;s visible immediately with no warning. [5]Note the visibility and status options above the date: Wordpress does support some options for &quot;draft&quot; or &quot;pending review&quot; options with private&#x2F;password-only visibility, but apparently TNW - a business that draws $15 million in revenue, is among the top 20,000 websites, and has dozens of employees - didn&#x27;t use them before this oops.I somehow assumed that there would be a red-tape process involving legal, editorial, and managerial oversight before you could get any content to the front page of a site like this. Not sure after seeing this if TNW is just playing fast and loose, or if everyone is...[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.support.wordpress.com&#x2F;schedule-a-post&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.support.wordpress.com&#x2F;schedule-a-post&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0CxPYhS.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;0CxPYhS.png</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qa7emUd.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;qa7emUd.png</a>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;svyNS6K.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;svyNS6K.png</a>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dPyURfD.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;dPyURfD.png</a>

Look at the URL. The datestamp is set to the 5th instead of the 8th, when the embargo for the news lifts. The only reason this post was published early was because a stupid typo when scheduling it.

never heard of them. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;re hungry for a big break.

It&#x27;s TNW, the Sun or BILD of tech news. Expected behavior.

Sure, theNextWeb had a &quot;scheduling error&quot;, and this has nothing to do with being the first to put this news out.

I&#x27;m fairly sure that the bulk of GitHub&#x27;s revenue comes from companies using GitHub as their primary SCM.B2B revenue is huge compared to anything you&#x27;ll get from the few hobbyists who are both able and willing to pay for this kind of service.

It sounds like recently they sorted things out, but Bitbucket&#x27;s interface was buggy to the point of unusability for me.  Some scary permission issues like not being removed from a corporate team.

Just to throw in my anecdote, I&#x27;ve been paying for a personal account for 8 years. It&#x27;ll be interesting to see where Microsoft goes with this.

I started paying a year or two ago when I wanted to make a private side project that I didn&#x27;t want open source. It&#x27;s nice to keep the same UI between other projects and this one. $7&#x2F;mo or whatever it is was worth it IMO. Plus I like their lightweight project management tools.

I&#x27;ve paid $8 for the basic plan for years.

I&#x27;m an individual software contractor and I pay for a personal plan. GitHub UI and UX appeal to me more than competitors do. Also it seems that all the libraries I regularly use keep their code on GitHub, it feels like a community to me.

In third world countries we typically don&#x27;t want to spend $100 a year for something like this when BitBucket and GitLab are free. This change is a big deal for our situations.

Anecdote: I used both GitLab and a paid GitHub personal account.I didn&#x27;t opt to pay for GitHub until I needed to host some private config files in Git, and at the time (maybe a year, year and a half ago?) GitLab wasn&#x27;t in as great of shape as it tends to be now: for me, it was slow, unreliable, and sometimes just felt &quot;off&quot; in ways I can&#x27;t really quantify. I already used Github for open-source work and at my day job (and had been using it at work for years), so I paid up (given the alternative, with GitLab not being what I was looking for, was to pay up and host a Gitea instance, or use BitBucket, which was a complete non-option for me).These days GitLab seems to be a lot more stable and able to handle day-to-day workflows, but GitHub still has the community factor, so all my public repos and forks live there. It made sense to continue to keep my private repos next to my public ones, so when my annual subscription renewed, I was cool with it.Migrating fully over to GitLab&#x2F;Gitea&#x2F;flavour-du-jour is something that&#x27;s perpetually on my &quot;TODO: investigate&quot; list, and never actually gets done, because despite any minor gripes I may have with it, GitHub tended to &quot;just work&quot;, and it &quot;just worked&quot; ~$80&#x2F;yr worth.

I have zero insight on this but I also don&#x27;t know anyone in my circle who pays individually for Github... When they need that, they use Bitbucket.I know several people I worked for or did business with that paid for Organization accounts, from Team to Enterprise.

Yeah I&#x27;d imagine that GitHub Enterprise and org subscriptions are their primary source of income. User subscriptions never really made much sense to me.

If you want I suspect you can just go play with:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2017-01-19-github-data-ready-for-you-to-explore-with-bigquery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2017-01-19-github-data-ready-for-you...</a>I guess it only counts open source projects, but still that&#x27;s a lot of data.

Never mind loss leader; github can probably pay for itself by providing internal analytics to Microsoft which they can use for qualifying hires.

Why would better integration between Github and Microsoft dev tools be a bad thing?

I always believed Microsoft saw GitHub as a potential &quot;in&quot; for millions of developers, rather than a product that could generate revenue.This move doesn&#x27;t worry me, as I&#x27;m sure Microsoft would look to do something easy to calm the nerves of people who worried about Microsoft&#x27;s acquisition. The cynic in me sees this as sweetener for Microsoft&#x27;s later moves to integrate GitHub with Microsoft&#x27;s developer tools, which will infuriate me along with millions of other developers.

I&#x27;m curious if GitHub is now a loss leader for Microsoft, or if personal subscriptions were a small portion of their revenue.

That&#x27;s cool. I have no problem paying a bit each month for more features on GitHub so hopefully they add more powerful features, but free private repos for individual projects is great since GitHub for many people is a portfolio.

I guess that depends on your definition of “killer”, particularly wrt Jira.

Bitbucket’s killer feature is integration with JIRA and the rest of the Atlassian stack, so I doubt it’ll have much impact.

Free private repos is exactly why I was using BitBucket.  I will have to think it moving will justify the effort.

This is exactly how I see it too.If anything this move might be beneficial for Bitbucket because if there&#x27;s a 0% chance we would use their other paid products, we were just taking up resources.

In my case, Bitbucket will lose someone who was just using it as a dumb git storage backend, and did not engage with the Atlassian products at all. I assume that they won&#x27;t be particularly bothered to see the likes of me drop off.

I imagine this will harm BitBucket somewhat.

This is a bold move. That should prevent a potential exodus to other companies, post-Microsoft acquisition, although doubtful if such a bleed in customers occurred yet. GitHub is far ahead of everyone else thanks to its user interface anyway. This should at least force the competition to step up big time.

And that&#x27;s probably why they did it :)So others won&#x27;t leave for gitlab.

That’s my exact issue with GitLab. They have a ton of features but they are not the best at any of those features.

+1 Gitlab is awesome! Cool community oriented developers and a ton of more features. I see no reason too use github when gitlab is just better. It&#x27;s also offered as a self hosted service.

Well, either Way I will not leave Gitlab anytime soon.

I didn&#x27;t know this existed, thank you for pointing it out.

Github does have &quot;Actions&quot; which is their version of this which is in beta:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.github.com&#x2F;actions&#x2F;creating-github-actions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;developer.github.com&#x2F;actions&#x2F;creating-github-actions...</a>

It’s unlikely due to how it works internally. They’d basically have to rewrite most of it from scratch. Not to mention “Bitbucket Server” is a completely different codebase (used to be called stash)Source: used to work at atlassian ;P

I wish they&#x27;d port this over to Bitbucket Server sometime soon. Bamboo is a massive pile of garbage compared to most other CI offerings these days.

Azure pipelines is basically the same thing and offers free build to for private repos.

One thing I like about bitbucket&#x2F;atlassian over github is bitbucket&#x27;s pipelines[1] and the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file. I really wish github had something like that.[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;product&#x2F;features&#x2F;pipelines" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;product&#x2F;features&#x2F;pipelines</a>

Well hey, something GitHub lifted from GitLab, for a change.

Students are usually eligible for free private repos. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;education.github.com&#x2F;pack" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;education.github.com&#x2F;pack</a>

This is the main reason I used GitLab.  Can&#x27;t make student Git repositories public!

I&#x27;ve been paying $7 a month since like 2010. Woohoo!

I did the exact same thing a few weeks ago.

Isn&#x27;t a migration back just a git clone away?Assuming you&#x27;re not using Issues or anything non-portable.

It sounds like it was the right call at the time. You can&#x27;t time corporate strategy shifts any more than you can time the market, so just make the best calls you can with what you know.

How does this change by Github make you regret migrating to Gitlab? Do you think Gitlab&#x27;s offering is in some ways inferior?I mirrored everything to Gitlab sometime ago, for public repositories and also use them for private repositories. The only real advantage I could specifically name for Github is the organic contribution factor due to their volume of traffic. However, this doesn&#x27;t really apply to private repositories.Edit: I see this has been answered below now - time spent migrating.

I actually switched from Github to Gitlab about two months ago just for this reason. I bootstrap my company from my own pocket and wanted to save a few dollars every month. Really wish I knew this was coming before I deleted the repos and migrated everything.edit -- to everyone asking, I have no problems with Gitlab and I also have no strong preference Gitlab vs Github, they both perform the same role for me in exactly the same manner. I just wish I had those couple of days back that I spent migrating and editing my deploy scripts.

Azure DevOps is a lot more than just source control, so there isn&#x27;t all that much overlap with what GitHub offers. I imagine the future will be GitHub for VCS, issues, project management and Azure for CI&#x2F;CD, testing and deployment.

Azure Repos likely will remain competitive, at least in the near term, with GitHub simply for its &quot;by default&quot; integration with the rest of DevOps (versus GitHub&#x27;s opt-in to the rest of DevOps), and easy hooks into corporate SSO and billing (Office 365). It will be interesting to see what happens with Azure Repos in the longer term.

GitHub is now the Azure front-end with more mindshare. So I&#x27;d imagine it will be the one that survives, at a brand level at least.

Yep, although one of the products this competes with is Azure DevOps - which also offers unlimited git repos... and is of course also owned by Microsoft!I&#x27;m wondering what the future holds for both GitHub and Azure DevOps. I actually use both, and have done for several years, and they&#x27;re both great products - I&#x27;d hate for either of them to go away.

Yeah indeed. I actually thought for a moment this meant I could switch back to GitHub, but I use gitlab-ci a lot and really like it.

I moved to Gitlab because we can run the free version at work - until Github does that, I have no reason to not stay with Gitlab

I actually switched back to GitHub yesterday, because it‘s still better integrated in the overal tool landscape (eg Heroku). So I just pulled the trigger on a $7 subscription for private repos. And today the good news of free private repos arrived :)Edit: typo

Thats why Github won&#x27;t want people testing GitLab because feature wise Gitlab is a much better product and is getting better at a faster rate than github

Seems appropriate that the hub for open source would be open source itself. This is my biggest issue with gitlab

My move to Gitlab was basically &quot;come for the free repos, stay for the rest of the amazing features&quot;. I will not be moving off it, and my new repos will keep being on Gitlab.

...that sounds suspiciously like you&#x27;re storing binaries in git.

I switched to gitlab for the 10g free space per repo.  Wont be switching back to github until they beat that.

I am not sure what you are asking, but yes you can create and review PRs in GitLab.GitLab is GitHub but with more features and a smaller community. GitLab focuses more on code than community, at least from my experience with it.

Yes. The free tier has the basic pull request functionality (called merge request). Some features (require approvals before PR merges from contributors, require approvers from certain groups) are limited to paid tiers on gitlab.com

Does gitlab have free integrated PR code review tools?

Maybe not so smart when devs realize that the free private &quot;repos&quot; have features removed that have been standard. The marketing avoids this fact. You need to scroll down to the &quot;Comparison&quot; section to see it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing#feature-comparison" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing#feature-comparison</a>

This is a smart move.Gives developers who have small indy projects a reason to use Github rather than a competitor (I know I use gitlab precisely because it&#x27;s free for my private one-off repos).

Maybe, maybe not...Open source is just as much a culture. I don&#x27;t mind fewer repositories without a LICENSE.I suspect people who wanted free private hosting used gitlab or bitbucket.

Yeah, I&#x27;ve just been using bitbucket for this purpose for years.

Yep, it makes sense. I think this is why it was an easy decision for them. GitHub does not want developers getting cozy with Gitlab&#x2F;Bitbucket, even for personal projects, because then those developers will start to push the companies they work for towards those same providers.

I can only speak for myself, but I had simply put all of my private stuff over in GitLab instead. For folks like me, this will result in no external change. Just a question of where I stash stuff.

But doesn&#x27;t that kind of assume there was previously no free way to host private repos?

Hadn&#x27;t thought of that. It&#x27;s genuinely a worrying potential side effect.

For better or worse, having a Github profile is now a thing that’s expected of developers, so public repos are here to stay.Personally speaking, I’ll still default to public for my side projects. But a free private repo sounds like exactly the thing for online classes or web challenges where you’re explicitely asked not to share your code. I’ve just started on the cryptopals challenges, now I know where to put my code :D

You could be correct, but the “social network” boost to reputation potential is strong enough now that I suspect a lot of people will still choose to post public content where reasonable, while us cheapskates won’t have to look to another platform for private code hosting.

I feel like most people either want their code public (they want to share their projects with the world) or they want it private (they don&#x27;t want the rest of the world to see their embarrassing toy projects).I think the projects that could go either way -- that are public just because it&#x27;s cheaper than private -- probably aren&#x27;t that common or that important.

Plausible, or maybe more people will try things privately and when they get some interesting results they&#x27;ll turn it public. I know I had a little amount of shame in not throwing lots of stuff publicly..

On the flip side, the amount of Hello World projects masquerading as useful things in their README.md in search results until you actually click through and look at them properly will hopefully drop off a cliff.

Agreed. I can&#x27;t tell you how many times I&#x27;ve been at my wit&#x27;s end trying to figure out how to do something, and stack overflow had failed me, and in my desperation I start searching github for strings like &quot;GL_ARRAY_BUFFER&quot;, and scroll through dozens of pages of results, and lo and behold, someone&#x27;s half-finished toy application contains exactly the line of code I was looking for.

I have had unlimitee private repos on GitHub for over three years (job perm) and have made use of them twice ever. One for my vimwiki and the other was created and then touched.Hopefully others will be like me and simply opt to not use it.

I doubt it. I don&#x27;t see how more developer agency is a bad thing. If anything, more people will start using Github earlier on in their development cycle and Github will be the obvious platform of choice for when those projects are ready to go public. On the contrary, I think we&#x27;ll probably see less trash and more quality projects on Github.Besides, I wouldn&#x27;t want to live in a world where people want to do X (private repos) but are forced to do Y (public repos) because X is not feasible. Now X is feasible and the landscape will more accurately reflect developer intentions.

While understandable, this is sad to see. The amount of interesting and useful code that is currently available due to GitHub defaulting to public will likely be seriously negatively impacted by this.

I imagine they&#x27;ll eventually remove individual plans entirely. Microsoft probably doesn&#x27;t care about the tiny revenue from random developers paying them and would rather focus on enterprise plans.

So now what benefits does a subscription offer for a casual developer?If the 3 collaborator limit isn&#x27;t a problem, is there any reason to keep a subscription?

&quot;Due to a scheduling error, we published this story one day before the embargo lifted. This feature isn’t live yet, but Github will formally unveil it tomorrow. When that happens, we’ll update this post with a link to the official announcement. &quot;Well played @The Next Web :D

Yup.  At least at the business tier you can.  Push to gh-pages and it deploys to the site, but site visitors never see the ingredients that go into the sausage.

Nope, not on the free tier via a private repo.

Looks like no longer:`Upgrade to GitHub Pro or make this repository public to enable Pages.`

Can a Github.io website be freely hosted with a private repo?

I actively avoid using GitHub private repositories for this very reason since I have too many 7-9&#x2F;month subscriptions it all adds up fast. This actually will encourage me to start some fun project ideas more now that I know I can rely on the private repos.

I&#x27;m pretty sure it will be paid feature in near future.

GitHub Actions is going to be GitHub CI for me: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions</a>

It does. I&#x27;m using them now, but they might still be only available to beta users right now.

Maybe Github Actions qualify? <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;features&#x2F;actions</a> I must say it looks almost like Gitlab&#x27;s pipeline system, but somewhat more flexible. If Github&#x27;s free plan allows you to use pipelines I might just have to test it to compare.

Now I&#x27;m just waiting for GitHub CI. :)

I wonder if it is because they are noticing their userbase numbers slipping.

This was the main reason I moved away from github. It&#x27;s late, but still a welcome move.

Just by the nature of the comment, dropping such an inflammatory claim with 0 context or evidence, you can tell they were probably flagged with good reason.

They banned you for a negative comment on HN?

&gt; Everything Github does is great!&gt; (I say this -- because last time I said something negative they banned me).&gt; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;WvC3qpM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;WvC3qpM</a> I have the impression that they banned your GitHub account because of your username [1].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ransom1538" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ransom1538</a>

Same here. Does <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;source.cloud.google.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;source.cloud.google.com</a> work for you?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com</a> ?

I&#x27;ve found usefull code snippets on github via google in the past.

What you describe used to be a problem years ago, but since they updated their search to its current iteration a year or two ago, I have had no issues finding exact string matches in repos. Can you give an example of a repo and a search that fails?

Honest question: how do you make github search work for you? It often fails to find stuff that I know exists in a given repo. Nothing fancy, even single-word full symbol names.

I cannot agree more with this. I love being able to search and see how libraries are being used in real life projects. It definitely helps.

I have also experienced this phenomenon. Finding some brilliant hack used in a randos personal project to work around a bug or deficiency in a popular library.Finding a library with no documentation then Searching GitHub to see personal projects where the owner has already reverse engineered and integrated.I always admired Github for incentivizing public repositories to promote collaboration and open source. Would hate to see that fade away.

Perhaps that&#x27;s how they&#x27;re killing OSS?

This is the killer feature of GitHub for me. When learning a new language, being able to sense-check your code against what someone has done in the past has helped me understand how and why some things work the way they do.

One of the best uses of GitHub is being able to search for some obscure framework method name or enum constant, and find examples of working code that uses it. This has saved my life many times when trying to figure out how to configure Java frameworks to interact with each other.When searching for this kind of code, you have to wade through an awful lot of repos containing half-baked personal projects, experiments, unmodified clones of upstream frameworks, and barely-modified boilerplate examples. It would be nice if there was less of this detritus clogging up the search results.However, sometimes the code you actually want is embedded in some otherwise useless, half-baked personal project, or barely-modified boilerplate example. So if all these projects disappear behind a veil of privacy, maybe it won&#x27;t be a net win.

&quot;Due to a scheduling error, we published this story one day before the embargo lifted.&quot;This is really poor from TNW. They spoiled all the excitement in twitter tomorrow!

Nice. I wonder though whether in 5 years they won&#x27;t discover it costs them money and decide to take it back.

I&#x27;ll be curious to see how much Git-LFS is offered. I&#x27;ve been using Gitlab for private repos, but I need LFS as well.Also, will be curious to see the pricing structure - if this changes anything. The sad thing about Github is I always liked it more than competition, and I wanted to pay, but the price felt a bit steep for my usage. Since private will now be free, I hope they have some type of $4&#x2F;m price range for solo devs, slightly better than free.

From my own perspective,this results in me doing two things:- cancelling my paid subscription: but in truth I was planning to do this anyway and moving to self-hosted in some way...I just wasnt getting relative value paying to just have private repositories for my own projects (I don&#x27;t want contributors, but that doesn&#x27;t mean I want my work to be public).- but I will now as a result keep my repositories and activities on github. So this is a win for me: less work for now.

GitHub is just a (blood-)funnel for Azure now.

There&#x27;s enterprises and teams paying. This announcement is only for individual plans.

So what commercial service will GitHub offer to monetize at all? Ads? Data collection? I don&#x27;t see a reason for anyone to pay for GitHub now.

This seems like a negative for Open-Source.

That sucks. I just bought a 1yr subscription last week...will they issue refunds?

The author accidentally scheduled it to be published on the 5th instead of the 8th, and wordpress automatically publishes things if the date they are scheduled to be published is in the past.

That&#x27;s probably the date it was saved &#x2F; authored.

I don&#x27;t understand. I can see it was published 2 days ago but author says it he mistakenly published 1 day before announcement. So Announcement should have happened if it&#x27;s for real?..Is this for real ?

When your competitors (bitbucket&#x2F;git lab) have been offering the same thing for a while now, it only makes sense.

This was the reason why I mostly use GitLab for several years now. I prefer to make public those code that are refactored, well crafted and documented.

My strategy of avoiding this banner paid off: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;224133cb505d" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cl.ly&#x2F;224133cb505d</a>

At most you could have 21? You are de facto a collaborator I would presume.

I had assumed it was 3 collaborators per repo.

If all collaborators have their one copy of the repo, you no longer need GitHub, because there&#x27;s no longer a centralized repo. Just use git.

Also, if you fork a private repo, I wonder if that’s 3 new collaborators? Could you have essentially unlimited collaborators by forking for each person and having them submit pull requests?

They don&#x27;t have to be the same.
Any &quot;team&quot; working on a private repo cannot be bigger than 3 collaborators.

Hi! I work at GitHub.Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators per repository, not including the owner.So, in your example, if you have 10 private repos, you can have 30 collaborators, without counting you - the owner. (3 collaborators * 10 repos)

&quot;Private repositories on free accounts are limited to three collaborators apiece.&quot;So let&#x27;s be clear here. If I have 10 private repos, I can have 30 collaborators? Or they must be the same three.

I always got unlimited repos, i have unlimited email accounts. it&#x27;s just good opsec to run multiple accounts.

I guess goodbye Gitlab.  Only reason I used it was free private repos.

Just for context. Microsoft already offers free private repos, hosted builds, etc for Visusl Studio Team Services aka Azure Devops....

How will users be monetised now?Selling Azure services.

Github&#x27;s team pricing is per-user and non-negligible: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing</a>

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

So maybe we should create a bunch of private Github repos and fill them with spurious &#x27;good code&#x27; and spurious &#x27;bad code&#x27;?

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 &quot;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&quot;

Teams with more than 3 people will still need to buy a subscription:&gt;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.

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.

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

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&#x27;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.

Agreed but I hesitate conclude that Microsoft wouldn&#x27;t care about making some extra buck by placing ads. The amount of crap I&#x27;ve seen with windows 8 and 10 was disgusting

(disclaimer, I work for Google, opinions are my own)Depends on the product you are using and what kind of data you&#x27;re talking about. For Google, GSuite (the old Google Apps and GCP) are more business focused and don&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure what kind of data they get out of Bing and outlook.com&#x2F;Hotmail. Then you have LinkedIn, which is all kinds of data gathering (though more Facebook style).It&#x27;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.

They&#x27;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&#x27;s plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren&#x27;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.

&gt; Generally when previously paid stuff becomes free, it&#x27;s because the paid service is no longer a product - it&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t hesitate to buy it because all of their employees already know how to use GitHub and love it.

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.

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&#x27;s because the paid service is no longer a product - it&#x27;s now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?

Are people really ashamed of their code? How are they even able to assess the quality of their code especially when they are just getting started? It feels sort of a Catch-22. Also, how does making private repos free help here?I think a more encouraging move would be to have people with all experiences share as much of their progress as possible so that people who are getting started can find inspiration and learn to overcome their &quot;imposter&quot; feelings.

I think it is great for users that private repos are now free up to three users. This is especially great if you&#x27;re starting to program and don&#x27;t want to feel ashamed of your code but don&#x27;t have a paid account.I like to think that increased competition from us (GitLab) contributed to this change, we recently passed 10m repositories on GitLab.comAt GitLab we think that repositories will become a commodity and we&#x27;re focussing on making a single application for the entire DevOps lifecycle.I think Microsoft will try to generate revenue with people using Azure more instead of paying for repos.Also see our blog post <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;07&#x2F;github-offering-free-private-repos-for-up-to-three-collaborators&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;07&#x2F;github-offering-free-pri...</a>

I was just about to move everything to Gitlab for this very reason. I&#x27;ve always preferred Github, so this is fantastic.Thanks, Microsoft!

Yeah, that&#x27;s exactly what I&#x27;m thinking.So, what&#x27;s their social graph play?

Microsoft has both linkedin and github, meaning they have the social graph of the government, business and the technology spheres. That social graph is arguably even more valuable in terms of revenue opportunities than facebook&#x27;s. Direct revenue of linkedin and github might as well be irrelevant.

And Microsoft is in good relationship with the government and agencies. Guess how valuable is that data for them :)And guess what they want... &quot;Private code to know what people are working on.&quot;

So, Microsoft cares more about capturing the complete social graph of the software community than it does about direct revenue from an already not-very profitable (or perhaps not at all profitable?) acquisition.Got it.

Just in time!My free academic discount expired a month ago. I was thinking to subscribe $7&#x2F;month but it seems like I won&#x27;t need to pay.I was even sold to 10 private repos with 1 dev shared :)

Ah that&#x27;s good to know. Do you have a copy of the apology? Sadly, I don&#x27;t have access to Chris Wanstraths email.

I&#x27;m sure they apologized to Github, even if they didn&#x27;t apologize to you for reading it.

&quot;Due to a scheduling error, we published this story one day before the embargo lifted. This feature isn’t live yet, but Github will formally unveil it tomorrow. When that happens, we’ll update this post with a link to the official announcement. &quot;Not even an apology in there, would have expected more from TNW.

That was just posted (in response to this embargo break)

Thanks, we changed to that from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;dd&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;github-now-gives-free-users-unlimited-private-repositories&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;thenextweb.com&#x2F;dd&#x2F;2019&#x2F;01&#x2F;05&#x2F;github-now-gives-free-u...</a>.

Nobody has mentioned the official GitHub announcement yet?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;</a>

Official announcement<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;</a>

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.github.com&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;</a>

Unlimited private repos was why at some point I used Gitlab, and why I was grateful that my email address from an old educational institution still worked. I&#x27;m glad that they&#x27;re making this change.

Is that really comparable? Github&#x27;s competitors were already offering free private repo so it&#x27;s only natural that they try and keep up with the market.

The lawsuit wasn’t because it was free. The lawsuit was because IE (a web browser with a weak market position) was bundled with Windows (an OS with a dominant, almost monopoly position).

I know the new Microsoft seems different (and I&#x27;m a fan), but I can&#x27;t help but feel like we&#x27;ve seen this movie before.Recall back when Internet Explorer was free and bundled with Windows, and there was a whole antitrust lawsuit over it by the Department of Justice. What was old is new again.

One of the few online services I saw enough value in to pay for. I guess I can stop now. Sweet deal.

What gives you the idea GitHub weren&#x27;t already doing that?

Well then you could pay for your account. You can’t have it both ways.

You think with all the telemetry MS put in Windows 10, there is not going to be any sort of customer reconnaissance going on in free GitHub?  There will be a lot of data mining going on.

Sure. My point is that I expect them to be respectful, not avaricious.Microsoft&#x27;s knows they ought not piss off 28 million developers.

Because you would destroy any trust you&#x27;ve built up with users and people would rapidly switch to another platform, as well as the developers of the GitHub objecting to having to build that.

All true, but why mot data mine too, while they’re at it?If you’re not the customer you’re a product... but it doesn’t follow that, if you are the customer, you’re not also a product.

LinkedIn might be successful, but its ugliness and spammy nature is in stark contrast with Github.

&gt; GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover?LinkedIn comes to mind, which was also aquired by Microsoft.

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.”A few reasons I don’t think that will happen:- private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account.- Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice.- Microsoft gets the reputation points for running the de facto developer social network (other than Stack Overflow).GitHub is in the strange position of being both a successful enterprise product AND a social network. What other product exists with that kind of crossover? Microsoft will continue to optimize their enterprise revenue from GH and I think this is a tremendous step forward toward building the network long term.

Announcing unlimited free private repos