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Comment by klinskyc | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Yeah, I've just been using bitbucket for this purpose for years.

Same here but now I will probably switch to GitHub because I like their product.

One more, except I was one of those paying $7 a month to GitHub for the private repo's.

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/Bitbucket, even for personal projects, because then those developers will start to push the companies they work for towards those same providers.

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.

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

Offline classes too! As a former TA, I can attest to sometimes being a struggle to deal with grading when students from past semesters have their code publicly available online. (The solution we used was to change the specifications for projects slightly so that old code wouldn't produce the correct results; generally students who would rather cheat than learn are too lazy to actually modify the code they're plagiarizing, and we usually caught at least one or two each semester)

Agreed. I can't tell you how many times I've been at my wit'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 "GL_ARRAY_BUFFER", and scroll through dozens of pages of results, and lo and behold, someone's half-finished toy application contains exactly the line of code I was looking for.

Maybe, maybe not...

Open source is just as much a culture. I don't mind fewer repositories without a LICENSE.

I suspect people who wanted free private hosting used gitlab or bitbucket.

But doesn't that kind of assume there was previously no free way to host private repos?

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'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'll probably see less trash and more quality projects on Github.

Besides, I wouldn'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.

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.

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'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's cheaper than private -- probably aren't that common or that important.

Hadn't thought of that. It's genuinely a worrying potential side effect.

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

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