After GitHub Issued a Big Benefit, the Freeloaders Are on the Way

Starting today, GitHub will provide free private repositories to all individuals and teams with unlimited collaboration, and all core features are also free. However, behind the comprehensive free policy, there are also some concerns.

Big news! GitHub officially announced this morning that all GitHub users and teams will bePrivate repositories with unlimited collaboration are available, and all of GitHub's core features are now free for everyone.

Great news! GitHub is giving out super benefits 

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said in the official announcement blog that until now, any organization that wanted to use GitHub for private development had to pay.But every developer should have access to GitHub, and price shouldn't be a barrier.

Now, the announcement of this free plan means that teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. GitHub wants everyone to publish great software on the platform.

Teams that need advanced features (such as code owners), enterprise features (such as SAML), or personalized support can upgrade for a fee.

also,The monthly pricing for paid teams has also been reduced from $9 per person to $4 per person.Effective immediately.What about paid users? Don't worry, GitHub will refund the price difference within 30 days.

The specific plans and price changes are as follows:

• GitHub Free for organizations is available immediately, including unlimited GitHub repositories.
• All organizations that previously used Team for Open Source now have GitHub Free;
• GitHub Free for individual developers has no limit on the number of people in the collaboration group;
• Organizations and individuals using GitHub Free will receive GitHub Community Support;
• GitHub Pro will now include 2GB of Packages storage and 10GB of data transfer; the monthly price has been reduced from $7 to $4;
• GitHub Team now offers a monthly subscription of $4 per user, with no minimum subscription required.
• Starting May 14, the GitHub team will provide 3,000 minutes of actions per month for private repositories.

User: It smells great! Thanks to Microsoft

Nat Friedman wrote in a statement:There are more than 40 million developers on GitHub.The team estimates that this number will reach 100 million by 2025.

That is to say, as of now, more than 40 million users will enjoy these benefits.

While everyone is excited, they are also curious: How did GitHub become so rich? How does it make money?

In Nat Friedman's online Q&A session on Hacker News today, a netizen couldn't help but ask a question out of curiosity, and Friedman's answer was,"We have a lot of large enterprise users!"

But is this really the case?

In fact, GitHub's profit model has always been a hot topic of discussion. Someone once analyzed that GitHub has no competitive advantage over BitBucket and Gitlab in terms of profitabilityFor example, Gitlab's solution based on its open source version may be more suitable for large enterprises willing to pay a high price.

Microsoft's original purpose in acquiring GitHub was not to focus on its profitability, but to care more about the customer resources that GitHub brought and the greater value it would create in the future.

In this case,GitHub can just focus on attracting more users, and leave the rest of the spending to Microsoft, the rich and powerful father..

Under the tweet in which Nat Friedman announced this news, there were cheers and expressions of gratitude to Microsoft Dad.

Weibo is also full of happiness: It’s great to have Microsoft as a dad!

Indeed, GitHub's series of free policies were all implemented after it was acquired by Microsoft.

On January 8 last year, GitHub announced that it would provide free private repositories for individual developers, namely GitHub Free, and also provide three free collaborators. If more collaborators are needed, payment will be required.

This announcement was already very popular at the time. Now, GitHub has made another big move and opened GitHub Free directly to teams. A large number of new users may be on the way.

Image hosting, mining machines, and cloud storage: benefits also bring risks of abuse

With the financial support of Microsoft, GitHub is becoming more and more conscientious, which is a good thing for most developers.

However, this inevitably raises concerns about whether it will be abused?For example, unlimited cloud storage space is used as free online disk or image hosting.

There are even developers who have written tutorials on how to turn GitHub into an unlimited cloud storage:

GitHub benefits have just been released today, and a large number of people who are interested in getting the benefits may be unable to sit still.

In addition, hackers have used GitHub's free web hosting service GitHub Pages to conduct phishing attacks.

These concerns are not unnecessary. There have been examples of free services being exploited and abused.For example, the free GPU resources provided by Google Colab will be used by some freeloaders for mining.

These abuses will only harm the platform and users. However, I believe GitHub will also take these issues into consideration and introduce relevant restrictive policies to allow the platform to develop more healthily.

-- over--