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.
That is a class act right there.
Now, if you would open source github...
I kid. I have zero hope that that will ever happen.
It has always been bizarre (IMO) that arguably the most popular open source dev forge, er, hub, is closed and proprietary. But what can you do?
Remember when all those FOSS devs sent an open letter to github whining about that and begging for attention? https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github (Ironically, they "signed" it by filling out a Google docs spreadsheet! As opposed to, say, patching a file.)
Utterly bizarre.
And now they have done it again, apparently because GitHub serves ICE: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0
They "call upon GitHub to: Immediately cancel your contract with ICE ; Commit yourself to a higher ethical standard with all of your business dealings ..." [in writing]. But they stop short of threatening to leave if GitHub doesn't comply with their demands.
Leaving aside the politics of ICE, and the strangeness of talking to "GitHub" like it's a single person, it seems to me that without taking some action (like moving to e.g. Srht or self-hosting a DVCS hub) that this is just posturing.
Anyway, congratulations on sucking more air out of the room of FOSS development. In the words of the aforementioned, undersigned, concerned peasants, excuse me! users, of GitHub:
> We still believe in GitHub as a platform, as a place to help the open source community make the world a genuinely better place. Please, step up and join us.