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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
Hey Nat glad to see you here. A few days ago one of the biggest team collaborative games (Space Station 13) got banned on GitHub without a public explanation from GitHub staff, but some suspect it was because the code contained bad words and slurs. Do you know if this is why the project was banned, and will these new private team repos be subject to the same terms/rules?

>>pubby+96
Private repos are not subject to our Community Guidelines on public content, so no, we don't enforce the same rules there: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-communi...

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.

>>natfri+I9
> 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.

>>yjftsj+Rc
No, it’s not fair. Banning a repo should be taken as seriously as banning a book. Living in a country that is US where github HQ is hosted, freedom of speech should be prized and cared for dearly. For a commercial company, there should be only one reason to ban a repo and that is to abide with a law. For even that company should do everything in its power to prevent that or provide a viable lawful alternative. This should be taken so seriously that each ban should have been reviewed at CEO level. GitHub CEO saying he has no clue, it’s a scale issue and “mistakes are made” is not really acceptable.

>>sytelu+s41
I appreciate the idealism here, but the reality is that trying to run a business under the pretense of free speech absolutism can alienate an otherwise profitable market segment. With the loss of that market segment likely comes the grumbling of investors, to whom ultimately the executive management is beholden.

Grumbly investors beget grumbly board members, who then vote to oust executives to correct the profitability problem.

>>nrr+B81
> can alienate an otherwise profitable market segment

How are you going to alienate/lose customers by not getting rid of customers? If anything, I'd argue the opposite; a platform that refuses to ban legal content is one that I find easier to trust (for a counterexample, see Google). It's not even like github-like companies are social networks where you can claim that one user's experience of the platform is made worse by another user's posts.