Case study on GitHub strategy during Coronavirus At the time of Pandemic most of the companies and individual developers are depending upon the collaboration systems more than ever before. One the most popular collaboration system for software developers known as GitHub has decided to increase the facilities given to the software developer in its free or no cost package. Starting from April 2020 GitHub has expanded its Free tier package to include big teams of more than three members. Previously free tier was limited to individual developers or small teams of no more than three collaborators per private repository. Private repositories is referred to the facility provided to the GitHub account holder to store their software code that can easily be accessed by the team members from anywhere. Others cannot access the codes stored in private repositories. Since Microsoft has acquired GitHub, it has been trying aggressively to get more developers to work with GitHub and open source project. Only recently in December 2019, GitHub has altered its licensing term and started offering unlimited free private repositories, for up to a maximum of three collaborators per project. 19 Case study 3: GitHub strategy during Coronavirus Due to Coronavirus, more and more companies are asking employees to work from home. Considering this as an opportunity to expand its base, GitHub brings new changes in free tier package and makes private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. Up to this point, teams larger than three people had to subscribe to one of the GitHub paid plans to do private development on the software version control and collaboration platform. This decision of GitHub has come as a big relief for software development companies in the current difficult economic situation. GitHub's decision may reflect both benevolence and commercial pragmatism. GitHub is a Microsoft subsidiary, and its strategy plays into the software giant's goal of owning as much developer mindshare as it can get. Meanwhile, GitHub reduced the price of its paid Team plan from $9 per user, per month to $4 per user, per month, effective immediately, and existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward. Teams using GitHub Free that need advanced features or personalized support can upgrade to one of the GitHub paid plans. GitHub's is facing competition from GitLab and increasing more features in free package can help the company to gain market share from GitLab. Also, if the GitHub Free users also start using GitHub Actions, then it becomes real sticky and chances are they will upgrade to the paid version. GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all software workflows. GitHub account holders can build, test, and deploy their code right from GitHub. 20 Case study 3: GitHub strategy during Coronavirus Overall, the move to let teams develop on GitHub for free opens the door for more social coding on the platform. This basically makes the different levels based on amount of consumption or specific features. Someone choosing free account will get the Features like GitHub action but only for limited time, the one choosing paid package get more minutes, similarly free account can give you package storage but limited storage and paid can get you more storage. Apart from this paid account can get something that free can never get like wikis, code owners and other things required for larger teams. Question 1: Evaluate the Microsoft strategy with respect to GitHub. Question 2: Investigate all the possible reasons behind the GitHub decision to expand the facilities in free tier package. Question 3: Last year in July 2019 Mrs Shaima has setup a new software development company with a small team of five software developers. She has been using GitHub free tier package since the inception of her company. Evaluate all the facilities that she is getting in April 2020 on her GitHub free account. Compare and contrast the facility she is getting now with what she used to obtain in March 2020 and November 2019