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.
If not, what's the goal of the complaints? I.e. why do you keep bringing this up if you know this is water under the bridge?
I'm a github user, though I wouldn't call myself a fan exactly, and I don't really know how "teams" works or why it's valuable. I came to this thread to learn more, and I find your comments grousing about Atom again. Hence my question.