Ignoring the fact that the VCs want to get paid and GitHub's employees want to keep working, how big of a skeleton crew would it take to keep a site like GitHub running in "maintenance" mode?
Post VC investment, GitHub would never be allowed to exist in maintenance mode. It would be liquidated in one form or another if things were that dire. Once they took the venture capital, the possible outcomes narrowed considerably.
Can you really put something in "maintenance" mode without killing it?
Maintaining the app and not moving forward with new features and adding value (because of lack of resources), I would assume it would just die eventually.
I don't understand this obsession with the first derivative of value. GitHub already provides loads of value. I understand they need resources to keep the lights on, but they could do that by recouping a tiny fee from their users and most everyone would be happy.
don't they already attempt to do that though? i don't consider $7/month a large fee. (granted, they could probably get more subscribers at $3-5, but i'm assuming they landed on $7 for a reason)
