Free GitHub accounts can [almost] work with private repositories without restrictions

This news is posted on The Next Web , with a note:

"Due to mistakes in planning, we published this news a day before the lifting of the embargo on disclosure. The feature is still not running, it will be officially told tomorrow. When this happens, we will update it with a new official announcement."

And there is such a wonderful thread on Twitter :

It is clear that the person wrote it with shaking hands - just like I am now writing with shaking hands this translation.

Is it a fake? Not. There is also an official confirmation on Twitter on GitHub , so there is no way back.

The feature was clearly rolled out in a hurry, some of the texts regarding tariffs are still not corrected on the site, and the attempt to downgrade the plan meets with such a dangerous looking message:

In general, we stock up on popcorn, cross our toes and wait for a good fit!

Today, GitHub is the most popular way to develop code and share it with the world. But there is an important drawback - limiting the range of users who can create private repositories (projects that are invisible to a wide audience and can be worked on only in a small group of previously known users - those who paid for it.).

Fortunately, all this is history. As of today, GitHub gives users of the free data plan full unlimited access to private repositories. This is wonderful news, but there is also a fly in the ointment.

Private repositories on free accounts are limited to the possibility of simultaneous work with only three co-authors at the same time. Despite the fact that this is suitable for a small project (for example, a team participating in the hackathon), it is unlikely to be suitable for true full commercial use.

It was probably a well-planned step. The risk that it will kill existing paid subscriptions is extremely small.

Until today, developers who wanted to create private repositories in the gita, but who did not agree to throw money at the monitor, used competing services - most often, BitBucket. Today's news, of course, is not so good for this flagship platform from Atlassian, but at least developers are no longer forced to use two different code management systems — separately for their private and public projects.

It is very interesting how these universally used private repositories will affect the culture of interchange and self-expression that Github tries to convey.

The absence of free private repositories, in fact, meant that people were forced to put out all their dirty laundry - all these half-unfinished projects that would never be finished, the whole curve of spaghetti code that I want to forget as a nightmare. Now people have a choice, an opportunity to hide everything in a perfect cache - and will it not harm GitHub culture, the culture of shameless openness and frankness?

May be. Time will tell.

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