The significant change to GitHub announced today by CEO Nat Friedman might be the first major change since Microsoft bought the company last year: free accounts can now create private repositories.

GitHub has become the home for a huge number of open-source projects. Some of these are major, widely used projects such as the Node.js server-side JavaScript platform, but many of them are small, personal projects, half-written programs, and experiments. These projects are typically open-source not because their authors have any particular desire to share them with the world but because GitHub gave them no choice: free GitHub accounts could only create public repositories.

As such, GitHub represented a trade-off: you could use GitHub's services for free, but you had to share. If you didn't want to share, you had to pay.

No longer. Now every GitHub account can create an unlimited number of private repositories. These are still restricted—only three people can collaborate on these repositories—but a great many of those projects that once had no option but to be opened up might now be marked as private.

The change gives GitHub approximate parity with one of its competitors—Atlassian's BitBucket allowed free-account holders to create private repositories restricted to five collaborators. But it shouldn't do much to harm sales of the commercial offering.

That commercial version is also being changed. GitHub previously had separate prices and products depending on whether enterprise customers were using the cloud-hosted service or the on-premises version. Both of these are now rolled into a single GitHub Enterprise product.

When Microsoft's purchase was first announced, Friedman tried to assure GitHub users that the intent was to make GitHub a better GitHub. This change, however, fundamentally altered the site, and not for the best. Given the option, many developers may now find themselves tempted to make all those little personal projects private rather than public. Many's the time I've heard a developer promise to release the source to a neat little program "just as soon as I tidy the code" or similar. That tidying never happens, or at least, it's never enough to get the code into a state the developer feels is satisfactory to unleash on the world. As a result, many programs that would previously have been published as open source will now be closed up forever.