The number of very small teams or individuals this encourages to start using github probably allows every organization who can't afford this to leave and github to still increase the money they're making. It seems like a good move based on my imagined profile of their user base. 1 million teens and young 20-somethings just decided they'll give 7$ a month to github.
For bigger organizations, this is practically no money compared to other software they're using. So they'll just take the hit.
Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.
> Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.
I would think this is a large segment, or at least Github would like it to be. Any software company that sells its software directly, and so has a sales team, a support team, marketing and so on will need to make all of those people users in Github if they're going to raise GH issues, see the code, prototype something for a client, help with branding, or anything else. If you're using Github the way they want you to (issue tracking, wiki, all of the things Github adds over vanilla Git that are "sticky"/hard to transfer to a competing service) you don't want to restrict access to just your developers. You want your whole company to be using it.
In any software company I've worked for, those non-developer users number 3-4x the actual number of developers. And I've never worked for a company that would consider restricting which users could raise issues with the product.
I agree that having a non-commit account status that didn't count toward the per-user pricing would fix this, for that particular (I think common?) case.
For bigger organizations, this is practically no money compared to other software they're using. So they'll just take the hit.
Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.
I think the question is why this took so long.