New year, new resolutions. There has never been a better time to be a GitHub user than now. Historically, GitHub always offered free accounts but the clause was that your code had to be public. This means that to get private repositories, you had to pay. Starting this week, that limitation is gone. Free GitHub users will now get unlimited private projects and repositories with up to three 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 and tech enthusiasts were rather nervous about the acquisition earlier on. It’s also a fair guess to assume that GitHub’s model for monetizing the service and marketing it 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.
GitHub also made an announcement that it is changing the name of the GitHub Developer suite to ‘GitHub Pro.’ The company says it’s doing so in order to “help developers better identify the tools they need.”
Source: TechCrunch
