Any semi-serious developer is going to use up the 5 private repos really quickly. 20 repos ($22/mo) is easily achievable for anyone who likes side-projects, and after that, larger plans are only "available on request".
I wouldn't expect GitHub to compete directly with BitBucket's pricing, but doubling the amount of private repos allowed wouldn't hurt.
Many serious developers opt to keep as much of their source open as they can. It's not uncommon to find dozens of public side projects in the repository list of Github users. Occasionally someone will stumble on something interesting and collaborators will sprout. This is far less common on Bitbucket.
Github's pricing policy seems to strongly encourage community and collaboration, and it works wonders.
Seriously. I always find it funny when people make generalizations like "Any serious developer would..." only to be 100% wrong (and thus proving that they aren't serious developers).
I used to think like your parent. Then I got over myself and just push everything to a a public github repo. So what if most of my project have no watchers and no forks. It can't hurt anything (except maybe my ego?). Once I did the transition with one of my bigger projects, I've nerver looked back.
Private repositories are for "serious" companies. Public repository are for "serious" developers.
This is largely true when you graduate as well. I still have all my grad coursework in git and find it useful to reference, but don't want to make public due to academic dishonesty.
I'd love to hear more about this academic dishonesty. I've been disconnected from academia for a long time.
For me, I specifically make a lot of my work public to avoid someone else claiming sole invention rights--as I have reasonable public proof of prior art. Though to this day this has never happened, and people have always given my projects more than appropriate credit without even having to ask.
Having served as a TA, I can assure you some students will seek out anything tangentially related and make few if any modifications to the project. This isn't just a case of reused projects, too. A lot of times our assignments would be open-ended within a framework (e.g., create a game that uses the minimax algorithm). Things like that. And naturally they seek out anyone that had taken the class previously.
It really depends on the type of side projects a developer does.
If it has something to do with their main business (say something to manage their server commands easily) or is integrated into another one of their tools the cost open sourcing it may not be worth it.
You're wrong. I use 2 private repos. I'm an academic and most of my work is open-sourced, except for two repos that represent external consultancy projects that I don't have the rights to open source.
I also think that you're wrong about bitbucket being much, much better. In this thread, most people seem to prefer the ease-of-use and style of github even if they think that Hg is a superior system to git.
I'm not sure why my ability to run my own Git server or use a provided hosted Git solution regardless of it's name affects the seriousness of my programming ability.
If you're even semi-serious about development, paying $7/month is nothing for the value they provide.