I think the original announcement was kind of tone-deaf, disorganized, and it felt like it took away a huge part of why so many developers come to GitHub - because it is a developer-first and OSS-first platform. A lot of OSS projects don't have funding, which is why it's AWESOME that GitHub offers a place to host code for free, and offers so many cool tools to developers.
I think the negative reaction to the announcement was because the only justification that was made was "we're doing it to reduce the cost of GitHub hosted runners" and it never really said the truth - that a lot of organizations HAVE TO use self-hosted runners due to compliance and privacy reasons. Oh, and they do pay quite a bit to use the GH platform already.
Had the announcement said "guys this is a hella expensive feature to run even if the runners aren't run on our compute" and spelled it out, it would have made a lot more sense. Luckily, I had a hubber who I could reach out to who was able to provide that info to me.
As someone who works with a lot of enterprise customers, two recommendations for when you do this in the future:
- BE TRANSPARENT. It's why we liked GitHub to begin with, and it's something that GH has been moving away from lately it seems........
- Maybe start with your larger enterprise customers first, not your smaller OSS partners or free accounts. Your enterprise accounts can afford it. I've done the math with a few of mine, and it comes out to a very minimal amount of Operational Expense for them in the grand scheme of things. Your for-profit customers can afford the op-ex. Your not-for-profit customers or non-business customers probably shouldn't incur that cost. Odds are if they are running their own hardware to run actions they're doing it for a reason.
Thanks for everything that you, Hubbers, do! We appreciate you, even when we don't tell you.