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.
I wasn't aware of SS13, and will look into what happened there. Content moderation at GitHub scale is hard and sometimes mistakes are made.
This is completely fair, but lack of transparency makes it significantly more frustrating.
* Sometimes legal counsel provide advice that there should be no further response to the individual or organization. Often technical people don't understand this situation, but it doesn't change the merits of the legal advice. In smaller organizations a leader might take a chance in further engagement, if they think it's helpful, but it's unlikely a large organization would expose themselves to this risk.
* Breakdown in internal response processes. You'll find that many people are really uncomfortable in these situations (e.g. compliance team shut down service, but don't "own" the response.) Unless the legal team has written a response and instructions on how to deliver it, you will often see people in organizations avoid giving the response. Things get passed down as low as they can go which doesn't help because there is less experience with handling tough situations. Very often some poor person with support ends up having to give the response and they basically ignore it because they can avoid the situation. This isn't very professional of the organization, but it's a reality.