GitHub Free Users Now Get Unlimited Private Repositories

GitHub has always offered free accounts, but users were forced to make their code public. To get private repositories, you had to pay. Now, as TechCrunch reports, "Free GitHub users now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators." From the report: The amount of collaborators is really the only limitation here and there's no change to how the service handles public repositories, which can still have unlimited 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.

Talking about teams, GitHub also today announced 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." But what's maybe even more important is that GitHub Business Cloud and GitHub Enterprise (now called Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Server) have become one and are now sold under the 'GitHub Enterprise' label and feature per-user pricing. In response, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said: "GitHub today announced the launch of free private repositories with up to three collaborators. GitLab has offered unlimited collaborators on private repositories since the beginning. We believe Microsoft is focusing more on generating revenue with Azure and less on charging for DevOps software. At GitLab, we believe in a multi-cloud future where organizations use multiple public cloud platforms."

IT'S A TRAP!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Run! Rabbit! Run!

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

.io comes from a crown dependency in the middle of the indian ocean, whose only occupants are british and american military. the cctld is administered by a british company.

yup. totally owned by the chinese.

Re:Self hosted collaborative tools.

[wolfheart111]

Find it on github.

Re:

[bill_mcgonigle]

Gitlab has a nice self-hosted open source project with federation and moderately-mature UI.

Nobody is going to trust some kids' project when they get a .io and post as AC on /. trashing other open source projects.

Re:

[easyTree]

Your repo must be rebooted to an earlier state to make it more awesome.

Your preference:
[ ] Now
[x] Later

Thank you.
Choosing random commit and rebooting Now!

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Their competitors offer free private repos, and it's one of the major reasons people use GitLab and BitBucket. Those platforms are not as nice as GitHub, but private repos are free.

So they get increased market share from this.

Obviously if you idea is super secret you don't want to use this.

Re:

[Chewbacon]

Can do the same at home with a VPN/SSH tunnel and it IS private.

Re:

[ledow]

If you're big enough to care or be of interest to Microsoft, you're big enough to run "apt-get install git" and configure it yourself on your own server.

If you're a hobbyist programmer, writing open-source, etc, want to pull in "unofficial" patches to projects, but don't want to embarrass yourself to the world, a free, unlimited and private repo isn't something to be sniffed at.

No different to Google Code (which I think is dead now?). I used to host all my own code - that nobody would ever care about, cont

A move to win users from bitbucket

[m.alessandrini]

Bitbucket is the place you go if you want a free private git repository on the cloud, so this is simply competition, not goodwill.

Re:

[h33t l4x0r]

Bitbucket is such a turd though. I welcome this change in a big way.

Re:

[jonwil]

Gitlab also offers free private repos without restrictions (I administer one myself)

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

In response, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said: "GitHub today announced the launch of free private repositories with up to three collaborators. GitLab has offered unlimited collaborators on private repositories since the beginning. We believe Microsoft is focusing more on generating revenue with Azure and less on charging for DevOps software. At GitLab, we believe in a multi-cloud future where organizations use multiple public cloud platforms."

Translation:

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk we just lost the only reason people were using us!"

Re:

[drinkypoo]

"Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk we just lost the only reason people were using us!"

I for one went to gitlab when Mickeysoft acquired github, so there are at least two reasons.

Re:

[drinkypoo]

Because GitLab is less likely to do something illegal than a company that constantly has lawmakers looking for the slightest edge to sue them out of existence.

It's called history, sport. Learn from it [wikipedia.org].

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

I’m not sure GitLab is that concerned about someone else drawing off some of their non-paying customers.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

They have the free offering because it often leads to paying customers. If people use the free version and get used to it they may then suggest that their company adopts it. That's what happened at my current and last employer.

Re:

[m.alessandrini]

Presumably many people keep or contribute to public projects on github because it's the most used one, and keep their private stuff on bitbucket or gitlab because it's free, so offering them a chance to unify everything in one place could actually be a huge win for github.

Re:

[ceoyoyo]

Yes... although the 3 collaborators restriction is still pretty annoying. I host private repos on gitlab and push public releases to github. Works fine, and also makes it a little harder to screw up and publish something sensitive.

Re:

[coofercat]

Personally, I use gitlab for such things, but I'd love to know how big github is now that the dust has settled on the MS deal. I mean, a load of people went to gitlab (and presumably bitbucket), but how many (genuinely active) repos are left on Github? It's still got to be comfortably the biggest, but I wonder how much it hurt them. Evidently enough that they need to do this...

Re:

[nine-times]

I don't think anyone was banking on Microsoft to be acting purely out of good will. At best, it's marketing that hopes to produce good will from us.

But I don't care much. My question would be, is it good? Or maybe instead I can ask, given this new offering, is this a better deal than what BitBucket or Gitlab are offering?

Re:

[petermgreen]

Github's advantage is it is the largest and best known of the git collaboration sites, so it is where you and your potential collaborators are most likely to already be set-up rather than creating yet more accounts on yet more sites.

The main downside of github's new free repos seems to be the collaborator limit, gitlab offers unlimited collaborators. Bitbucket seems to count any user you give access to a private repo as part of your "team" for the purpose of account limits (free accounts are limited to 5 "t

Your still giving your code to Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

So No thanks.

Real programmers don't use GitHub.

[LordHighExecutioner]

Since their code is by definition always correct, they store software versions to /dev/null.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I still don't get how a "pro" isn't capable of self-hosting a git repo. Perhaps souped-up with {gitolite,gitlab,gitea,...}.

Perhaps these are MCSE pros, then I'd understand.

The reason people pay for hosting things is that... people don't want to host things themselves. Being pro or not has nothing to do with it. Personally, I'd rather spend time working on my project than working on potential security issues that keep popping up with self-hosted stuff.

Some people even lease cars, instead of buying them.

I saved so much money I nearly went broke

[raymorris]

At a company I ran in 1990s we self-hosted version control, email, everything. We assembled our own servers, we wrote out own highly secure password manager. We did everything ourselves. We saved a lot of money vs buying. We also spent so much time and attention on handling our own infrastructure that we had little energy left to put toward our actual business, building our customer base, our brand, etc.

If I run a company again, I may let someone else worry about some of infrastructure while we worry about

Re:

[parkinglot777]

At a company I ran in 1990s we self-hosted version control, email, everything. We assembled our own servers, we wrote out own highly secure password manager. We did everything ourselves. We saved a lot of money vs buying. We also spent so much time and attention on handling our own infrastructure that we had little energy left to put toward our actual business, building our customer base, our brand, etc.

If I run a company again, I may let someone else worry about some of infrastructure while we worry about the things our business does.

In other words, time has changed. Back then, letting someone else taking care of hosting cost a lot more money than you do it yourself. Nowadays, it is the opposite. That's the advantage of doing so (ignoring any security issues that may arise).

Re:

[jareth-0205]

I mean also how much developer time can you buy for $14/ month or whatever it is. You only have to waste 30 minutes faffing about and you're immediately making a bad choice financially. I *can* self-host, but I'm an app developer, I'm probably better off improving the product instead.

Re:

[tepples]

I still don't get how a "pro" isn't capable of self-hosting a git repo.

Say you want to install Gitea, a self-hosted Git server, and make it visible to your remote collaborators. First you have to buy a domain name. Then you have to subscribe to a VPS because your ISP bans running an Internet-visible server on your plan or its carrier-grade NAT won't forward you an inbound port.

Re:

[tepples]

Of course I have a server "out there".

Many don't. And for some that do, such as myself, the server that we are leasing is restricted to run only web hosting because it is shared hosting, not a (more expensive) VPS.

Of course my ISP doesn't ban anything (otherwise I'd just switch)

Switching from one ISP that serves a given city to the other ISP that serves the same city doesn't work for everyone. Some countries have such a small allocation of IPv4 addresses that all ISPs in those countries have made it a standard practice to put a whole neighborhood behind one IP address. To upgrade to a static IP, you have to

Re:

[dbrueck]

A real "pro" is also always conscious of costs vs benefits in how and where they spend their time.

"Private" is in air quotes

[Anonymous Coward]

Private... right...

"unlimited"

[kbg]

I wonder what "unlimited" actually means with GitHub. I am pretty sure you can't actually create "many" repositories without GitHub shutting you down.

What if I wanted for example to use GitHub as my personal file backup? And just created one repository for each file and split the file up into multiple repositories for files over 1GB. I am pretty sure I could not do that even if it's "unlimited".

Not private

[Anonymous Coward]

We know how Microsoft handles "private" user data it has access to.

But CI is equally as important as private repos

[nickjj]

Having private repos is nice and all but CI is equally as important.

With that said, Gitlab + Gitlab CI is free to use and is a perfect match for solo developers or small teams with private projects, without having to invest in any additional services or infrastructure.

Where as on Github, if you have private repos, you can't use Travis CI for free, so now you have to choose between Azure pipelines (which is more limiting than Gitlab CI) or use some other free service like CircleCI which is also more limiting

Never accuse a company of goodwill

[Anonymous Coward]

> "This feels like a sign of goodwill on behalf of Microsoft"

Translation: "Microsoft has decided to kill BitBucket."

Anyone know when I can convert to the new plan

[bigmike_f]

I'm currently paying the small fee a month for private repos. (My plan cost is on the order of Netflix and Hulu and the like, something like under 10$ a month.) I'd really like to switch to this new plan, but don't want to lose my current private repos in the process. Any ideas when this will be available on the site, or how to configure your account with this free plan?

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