Today GitHub announced that you don't need a payed plan anymore to have private repositories for teams.
That is a big announcement and the first thought goes to the competing service, GitLab, that has been offering the same since the very beginning.
But this is somewhat also an interesting announcement that might have implications for the open source movement in general. Of course this is just a pure speculation, but anyway let's roll with it.
I think GitHub has been one of the organization that made the "Free for open source" business model popular. The "Free for open source" model works like this: you can use our service free of charge and we get back advertisement and feed our WOM marketing. Now developers (and companies) tend to be jealous/shy/protective toward their code, but they are also a pragmatical bunch: subscribing to a payed plan for my weekend-long side project or my hello world flutter might not be something worth doing.
But one thing about open source is that, like most thing, is a quantitative issue more then a qualitative one: once you get used to have your stuff open source, it becomes quite liberating (and, who knows, could even help you land a job). We can say that GitHub with its model has, at the very least, encouraged and promoted the open source software experience.
Microsoft on the other hand has historically been the fiercest enemy of the Open Source Movement. Microsoft, since 2018, owns GitHub, and, with this last move, if you are one of those suspicious people, you might think that they kind of want you not to think too much about all this OSS business: get your free proprietary repository and off you go.
Also this.
A pensar male si fa peccato, ma spesso ci si azzecca. - Giulio Andreotti
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