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Comment by hwstar | Hacker News Reader

I think the new management at Github is going to eventually alienate all of the users which have free open source accounts by introducing a monthly fee. They'll do this for 2 reasons. 1: To drive away the open source users so that the paying enterprise customers will feel better about using Github, and 2: to extract a revenue stream from the open source users which remain to cover the expenses of providing a repository.

I have several open source projects on Github, but if they try to extract a recurring revenue stream from me, I'll move the projects to another platform.

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I have a few projects on github and bitbucket, and find bitbucket a joy to use (and free, even for private projects).

Obviously, bitbucket could decide to do the same shortly after github (as I'm fairly certain they made free repos available to attract github's customers, and free private repos to differentiate). In the case that it does, I'm not sure what I'd do.

If both Github and Bitbucket drop free repos, there's still the option of self hosted Gitlab CE (or Gitlab.com if it doesn't follow suit)

That's the beauty of git. You can pack your bags and leave any time.

GitLab.com will be free forever, see the statement at the end of https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

Right -- I was wondering more where I would go for the social aspect.

As much as github is about just hosting code, it's also become a place where people who code/contribute to open source gather -- it doesn't seem right now like someone would just run a gitlab instance big enough to rival what github has become. Maybe the better question is when someone will step up to create that service/meeting ground.

I feel having open source project on Github is a benefit for the paying customers. You can hire employees already skilled at using it instead of it being a niche product that they have to learn. Not a major hurdle to learn it but it is a net positive anyway.

How does drive away of open source projects would make corporate customers feel better? They are related to me, but exactly opposite of what you said (open source projects test github features used by corporates).

It makes the corporate customers feel warm and fuzzy. All the resources used to support open source projects are redirected to the corporate users (i.e. the corporate users now have 100% of the attention of Github support)

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