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Andy Zhao (he/him)
Andy Zhao (he/him)

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GitHub Private Repos are Now Free

GitHub announced unlimited free private repos today.

You can add up to three collaborators to each private repo. There's also some other news related to the other pricing levels they have.

Personally the main reason I made a GitLab account was for the private repos. Think I'll stick with GitHub just because of familiarity. What are your thoughts?

Top comments (22)

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chiangs profile image
Stephen Chiang

And so many thought the Microsoft purchase was going to be a bad thing...

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_hs_ profile image
HS

Well they bought Skype. I don't use Skype any more because of their idea of improvement which was to slow down the app and make some irritating bugs (they did fix it but too late). They have enough time to prove you wrong and they usually introduce something "special" because it's their own way. Only 2 things I do not hate from them are office suite and VS Code. They have a mix of super useful ideas and irritating sh** inside of good tools. They're a bit complicated company.

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Stephen Chiang

They all are, haha. Nobody is perfect for sure!

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DamirTomic

They did this only to counter bitbucket / local gitlab

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Pedro Piรฑera Buendรญa

Iโ€™d do the same. I gage GitLab a try exactly for the same reason but Iโ€™m so used to GitHub, that I find it hard to navigate around GitLabโ€™s interface and concept. Iโ€™m so happy about this happening on GitHub ๐Ÿ˜‹

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Casey Brooks

I just went and downgraded my account ๐Ÿ˜‚

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Leighton Darkins

This is oddly well-timed for me.

I've had a paid GitHub account for the last little while to host some code covered by an NDA, now I can save myself $7 a month ๐Ÿ‘

I've also never given GitLab a fair chance. I'd love to hear folks' reasoning for choosing one over the other.

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Felicitas Pojtinger • Edited

GitHub is like 1% of what GitLab does (just VCS and issues, whereas GitLab is ... well everything you could possibly want). M$ bought GitHub and made it possible to create ~private~ proprietary software, no suprise. Also, GitLab is FLOSS and is being adopted rapidly by FLOSS projects (LibreOffice, GNOME, KDE, GIMP, GNU, FreeDesktop, Purism, Netlify, ...).
There really is no point in using GitHub (I just mirror my projects for visibility ... and stars, of course), and with remote merge requests comming soon, it really will be much easier to just ... use GitLab and be done with it. Also, GitLab's UX is much better IMHO. Responsive, Vue-based and, again, FLOSS vs 100% proprietary and M$-sponsored. Simply speaking: GitLab is the future, GitHub the past. Think SourceForge.

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andy profile image
Andy Zhao (he/him)

Same, I made a GitLab account last month because I wanted to start a side project. I procrastinated that side project, but now I can choose to use GitHub instead!

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George Nance

This is very big news. But it may be too late for me. I have moved my private repos to Gitlab and I have been loving it so far.

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Felicitas Pojtinger

And that was the right choice. GitLab is FLOSS & superior in every aspect except discoverability, and you can simply mirror to GitHub and be done with it.

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Vishnu Haridas

That's a nice move from MS. Now many side-projects will be moved to GitHub.

In my guess, the next move from GitLab will be improving usability of their integrated CI/CD tools which GitHub lacks currently.

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Saulo Vargas

I'm happy with keybase.io

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Andy Zhao (he/him)

That's interesting, do you mostly use it for private file storage? Does Keybase also have a VCS too?

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Saulo Vargas

I use it for both. And yes they provide a full encrypted and private VCS for free.

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Fernando B ๐Ÿš€

I use bitbucket for private repos. Now I don't have to. Thanks Github.

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Alexey Melezhik

Sounds like a good news, thank you!

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Abhijit Parida • Edited

Moved all my private repos from Bitbucket to GitHub. Bitbucket's private repo/collaborator policy is plain weird. 5 collaborators across all private repos? Nope.