I just wonder if there's a bit of a culture-jam here. It'd tempt you to not open up projects as freely, which seems at odds with the ideals of the GH camp.
The public repo thing is a bit odd anyway. Many public projects don't have a license attached to them. So they're not really open source, they're not public domain, they're just publicly viewable but you have no license to use it.
They'd be nuts to do that. They are getting $7/month from me, for a few private repos, and I bet I'm not the only one. If they up the number of private repos, I'll stick with them, rather than porting my inactive ones to bitbucket. But I doubt they'll make them completely free, even though the competition is free.
They have a great business model - free repos for OSS drives users, then they get users to pay a smallish (in absolute terms) cost for private repos. All they need is the million odd developers who use their system for OSS, and they will shake a few bucks out of each somehow. There's no need for them and BB to compete as though they were selling commodity products. Both are competing on getting people used to their interface (by OSS products) and then charging then whatever they think won't cause too much pain.
That said, people with lots of small repos are feeling unnecessary pain from Github's pricing scheme.
