I always believed Microsoft saw GitHub as a potential "in" for millions of developers, rather than a product that could generate revenue.
This move doesn't worry me, as I'm sure Microsoft would look to do something easy to calm the nerves of people who worried about Microsoft's acquisition. The cynic in me sees this as sweetener for Microsoft's later moves to integrate GitHub with Microsoft's developer tools, which will infuriate me along with millions of other developers.
Because I want GitHub to be agnostic and not pushing me towards anything?
This was always one of the core worries about GitHub and Microsoft. Microsoft will not leave GitHub alone. It's too important to developers, and no matter how much they say "we won't touch GitHub", nobody (rightfully) will believe them.
Not OP but I think some people think that Microsoft might make it more difficult to use other services with GitHub rather than just streamline it for Microsoft. I don't think strengthening Microsoft + GitHub integration is a problem and is probably smart for them to do. They just should not and probably won't make it prohibitively difficult to integrate with say AWS or GCP.
I'm assuming MS knows enough not to break existing integrations, but they could build in a direction such that Azure-based stuff becomes a "first, best" integration with GitHub.
Yeah I'd imagine that GitHub Enterprise and org subscriptions are their primary source of income. User subscriptions never really made much sense to me.
Anecdote: I used both GitLab and a paid GitHub personal account.
I didn't opt to pay for GitHub until I needed to host some private config files in Git, and at the time (maybe a year, year and a half ago?) GitLab wasn't in as great of shape as it tends to be now: for me, it was slow, unreliable, and sometimes just felt "off" in ways I can't really quantify. I already used Github for open-source work and at my day job (and had been using it at work for years), so I paid up (given the alternative, with GitLab not being what I was looking for, was to pay up and host a Gitea instance, or use BitBucket, which was a complete non-option for me).
These days GitLab seems to be a lot more stable and able to handle day-to-day workflows, but GitHub still has the community factor, so all my public repos and forks live there. It made sense to continue to keep my private repos next to my public ones, so when my annual subscription renewed, I was cool with it.
Migrating fully over to GitLab/Gitea/flavour-du-jour is something that's perpetually on my "TODO: investigate" list, and never actually gets done, because despite any minor gripes I may have with it, GitHub tended to "just work", and it "just worked" ~$80/yr worth.
I started paying a year or two ago when I wanted to make a private side project that I didn't want open source. It's nice to keep the same UI between other projects and this one. $7/mo or whatever it is was worth it IMO. Plus I like their lightweight project management tools.
I'm an individual software contractor and I pay for a personal plan. GitHub UI and UX appeal to me more than competitors do. Also it seems that all the libraries I regularly use keep their code on GitHub, it feels like a community to me.
It sounds like recently they sorted things out, but Bitbucket's interface was buggy to the point of unusability for me. Some scary permission issues like not being removed from a corporate team.
Bitbucket’s website is slow as hell. I actually physically cringe when I have to do something through the website (e.g. create a pull request) because I know I’ll be staring at slow-loading pages for the next 5 minutes, even for something that’s 3 clicks away.
And their new sidebar interface is not only slow, but also not very intuitive. It really makes me want to migrate our corporate repositories to GitHub.
In third world countries we typically don't want to spend $100 a year for something like this when BitBucket and GitLab are free. This change is a big deal for our situations.
