GitHub's success is based on its community. Simple fairness says the community should be respected and listened to, simple business says if the community doesn't get something back, it will get pissed and go somewhere else.

Again... No thought of how all this gets paid for?

By GitHub obviously. Improving their platform to maintain their momentum as a community hub is pretty much a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.

GitHub is a service, not a contracted vendor for work. There's a big difference.

They aren't a charity, but they have positioned themselves in that direction by targeting (and capturing) so many open source projects.

You'll have to explain why you think they are a charity, because I see no application of that term in a rational way.

GitHub got to where it is today thanks to the network effect that the undersigned helped create. If open source were to do a mass migration to another provider, many of the contributors whom are paying for private repositories and other features would most likely follow.

Yes, I do. If it was OSS I would PR the feature personally.

So most of the above replies seem to be a threat. Give us free stuffs. You have a nice website there, be a shame if anything happened to it.....

Seems like the Tony Soprano way of doing things.