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>>ig0r0+(OP)
Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.

We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).

In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.

>>natfri+V2
I'd like to thank you for this change but also in general all the amazing things Github is doing. I haven't finished high school yet but your Github Education pack is SO useful for me and I know I will never have time to use half of the stuff on it.

Thanks to everyone at Github making stuff like this possible and creating such a great epicenter for open source in general. Keep on being awesome!

Also I was wondering, Github is offering so many features for free, but does the company sustain itself through entreprise payments or some other stream? I was just curious. :)

>>etheri+g4
Glad you like the Student Developer Pack. All credit goes to the 100+ partners who provide something like $200k in tools and services to each student who qualifies for the pack. It's kind of mind-boggling, actually.

As for how we sustain ourselves -- lots of big enterprise customers!

>>natfri+A4
Good point. For anyone using the Student Developer Pack (or any other similar student offer), ask yourself this: Do you really want to become reliant on software and services that will cost you ~$70k/year as soon as you graduate?

Well, unless they decide to switch market or shut down, in which case you're hosed no matter how much you're willing to pay.