If the product people at GitHub don't understand the sales/marketing impact that GitHub's free offerings have on its paid offerings, then they need to hire new product people.
I think it's plausible that the authors of the "Dear GitHub" open letter already realized the truth of Julian's response, which is why they posed their request in the way that they did.
This gives GitHub three choices. They can react positively, remain passive, or react negatively. If they react negatively, they have the risk of a PR shit-storm, which will negatively impact new customer acquisition. If they remain passive, they risk the chance that the attention to this campaign will grow and their reputation will decline. This will negatively impact new customer acquisition.
However, if they react positively, they show good will toward consumers of their free offering, and they show would-be paying customers their willingness to improve their services. This will positively impact new customer acquisition.
Were this request not made in the open, GitHub would not need worry about any of these outcomes, and would therefore not be forced to react.
Github's life blood is not just the enterprise side, but its free offering, the community and the huge network effect it has over the open source community.
No one is sticking with Github because it has particularly good UI or functionality. Github raw functionality is completely undifferentiable from its competitors such as gitlab and bitbucket. People stay on github because of the number of developers who uses it, star counts, fork counts and reputation system it has built over time.
You can't search the code inside a repository, and the back and forward buttons on the browser don't even work correctly. Can't view a single file history either and it is probably missing a lot more.
And this fact is why Github can't afford not to prioritize "Dear Github." If there's one thing we've learned from social media, it's that network effect makes you strong as an incumbent, but it doesn't make you immortal. All it takes is one upstart that just feels "perfect" in terms of UX to cut into your bottom line. (Though I suppose you can acquire them...)
Furthermore, I work for a company that both pays for closed source repos and uses open source ones heavily. There are a large # of hybrid OSS/paid companies out there these days. The original author sounds like a pretty out of touch PM if you ask me.
I think it's plausible that the authors of the "Dear GitHub" open letter already realized the truth of Julian's response, which is why they posed their request in the way that they did.
This gives GitHub three choices. They can react positively, remain passive, or react negatively. If they react negatively, they have the risk of a PR shit-storm, which will negatively impact new customer acquisition. If they remain passive, they risk the chance that the attention to this campaign will grow and their reputation will decline. This will negatively impact new customer acquisition.
However, if they react positively, they show good will toward consumers of their free offering, and they show would-be paying customers their willingness to improve their services. This will positively impact new customer acquisition.
Were this request not made in the open, GitHub would not need worry about any of these outcomes, and would therefore not be forced to react.