Why is Github slashing prices?

Hi,
As many of you are probably aware, Github recently announced that they are slashing their prices and making lots of previously pay-to-access features free to all users.

In a tech crunch interview their CEO said, “We’re switching from a pay for privacy model to a pay for features model.” It’s great that developer teams are getting to access more privacy and features for less money. I’m left wondering though, what’s Github and Microsoft’s big picture goal with this? Do they just want to win the version control platform competition? Does anyone have a better big picture understanding of what is going on here?

I imagine most people here are also skeptical about “free” business models. Am I wrong to be skeptical of Microsoft and Github? Help me understand what’s going on here.

Thanks!

-Ryan

I found some very compelling arguments in the HN discussion about this… but I lack the time to find these comments now, so here is the whole thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867627

Thanks for sharing this. This was a helpful start.

1 Like

It’s interesting that Microsoft’s traditional “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” playbook could look exactly like what we’re seeing these days… Because of my 25 years history with Microsoft, I believe their “open source” (note, they never speak positively of Copyleft) rhetoric is entirely a PR exercise: they now realise that FOSS has defeated some of their attempts to proprietrise the ‘web’ for their exclusive benefit (e.g. when they canned Silverlight and grudgingly adopted HTML5, incidentally killing thousands of businesses who’d invested heavily into Silverlight). Now their approach seems to gather influence over FOSS projects, via grants, seats on the boards of formal organisations (like the Linux Foundation), paying for keynotes at conferences, etc. Once they make FOSS communities dependent on them for resources, it’s easy to co-opt them, and, for example, insist on Contributor agreements (allowing re-licensing of projects to more “business-exploitable” open source licenses rather than, say, exploitation-protecting Copyleft licenses), as well as other sorts of package deals which make proprietary Microsoft tools (e.g. VSCode) “first class” tools and accompaniments which eventually allow Microsoft to co-opt a critical mass of FOSS communities, thus extinguishing them.

2 Likes