GitHub announces unlimited private repositories for free account holders

It has been 6 months since Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion and already we are starting to see some major changes in the overall provision of services. GitHub has announced that free account holders will now be eligible to make unlimited private repositories on the platform. Previously, all free account holders were only permitted to host their code publicly whereas the private option was reserved for premium members on the platform.

For those of you who don’t know, GitHub is a cloud platform for code repositories and comes under the part of Version Control in Software Engineering. While programming, there are many changes that will be made to single or multiple code files therefore to keep a track of the changes and new functionality added, we use Version Control. This also allows remote collaboration as multiple developers can make commits to your repository. The biggest advantage of Version Control is that you can quickly identify bugs, say your previous version of the code was working fine then the obvious error lies in your newer version of the code and so forth.

The only limitation with private repositories is now the number of collaborators is 3. Services like Bitbucket and others are designed for private repositories for large development teams and they have better free plans. So GitHub’s offering is a step in the right direction but still, the competition in the private repositories segment is much higher.

Microsoft, however, is not interested in cashing in on small developer teams, therefore, we won’t see any change in the collaborator limit any time soon. Their main goal is to attract enterprises and they are doing so by making GitHub Business Cloud and GitHub Enterprise into a single service called GitHub Enterprise and the introduction of per-user pricing. They have also rebranded GitHub Developer Suite to GitHub Pro to help developers better identify the tools they need.

What are your thoughts on GitHub’s new free plan? Will you now use GitHub or continue using the same version control service you have been using so far? Let us know in the comments!