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've seen numerous posts noting the sharp decline in contribution soon after the acquisition was announced.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601451
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934
Without an official explanation, given the timing, it'd be reasonable to assume you pulled development resources away from it, the exact thing you actually went on Reddit to claim you wouldn't do:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...
P.S. I've observed that these kinds of posts tend to turn into a place where people shit on Atom in favor of _insert preferred other editor here_. Feel free to do that here too, but just note that I'm not going to be obliged to engage since it's completely orthogonal to the topic at hand. I think any remaining Atom users at this point are likely already painfully aware that Atom has long since lost the war in developer mindshare, but don't let that stop you from pouring salt on the wound.
Nat is the CEO of GitHub, not Microsoft, and despite any promises made on a Reddit AMA a year ago, why would they devote resources to two competing editors?
It offers very little solace to the few Atom users still hanging on, but I think the least he could do is end the speculation, and provide some certainty on Atom's future as a GitHub/Microsoft funded project so we could decide to either move on or stick around for longer.
Please realize that there still hasn't been an official statement that Atom's development at GitHub/Microsoft has been halted/dramatically reduced, or that they hope to transition it into a community led project, or anything to that effect.
I hope an official nail in the proverbial coffin is not too much to ask for.
EDIT: This comment was a lot snarkier in an earlier iteration. In hindsight, I realize that was in bad taste, so I've reworded it and adjusted the tone. I don't think being needlessly confrontational adds any substance to the discussion here (or anywhere else for that matter), so I would like to apologize for that and hopefully de-escalate so we can resume civil discourse.