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's because the paid service is no longer a product - it's now a tool to attract users. How will users be monetised now?
Meanwhile, if people that just don'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.
There's plenty you can criticize Microsoft about for sure, but they aren'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.
Depends on the product you are using and what kind of data you're talking about. For Google, GSuite (the old Google Apps and GCP) are more business focused and don'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'm not sure what kind of data they get out of Bing and outlook.com/Hotmail. Then you have LinkedIn, which is all kinds of data gathering (though more Facebook style).
It'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.
Does anyone remember how Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018? This is part of Microsoft'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't hesitate to buy it because all of their employees already know how to use GitHub and love it.
GitHub enterprise will also continue to provide a revenue stream.
>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.
Selling Azure services.