Pay your bills. I cannot take the idea that they're holding anything "hostage" when the whole thing is that you're not paying your bill. If you don't pay your car bill, they'll take it back.
You do not know other peoples' situations. And strictly speaking, demanding money to access your data is ransom.
> it would be better than automatically making private repo's public when you stop paying
False equivalency. I already said that "disabling repo and allowing primary user to download" was acceptable. I said nothing about private->public.
This whole situation only reaffirms my distrust in all cloud services.
EDIT: Seriously, -1 ? The user's data is sacrosanct. You disable most functionality, but you never, I repeat never delete data or make it irretrievable within a envelope of time for recovery. The only exception to that is if the user explicitly requests a permanent deletion - then you do so after appropriate warnings.
You're being downvoted for they ridiculous hyperbole of using the terms "ransom" and "hostage" for the situation, when it's just that you didn't pay your bill, so you don't get access to the service. Any web host would do the same, as would any other business. You don't pay your bill, you don't get the service. Why is that so hard to comprehend?
I think that's because the service is hosting the data, not the data itself. Holding onto the data which you (expect to) own is pretty much akin to a person taking care of a pet for money and when the money is not paid, keeps the cat. It's the obvious solution - the cat-sitter doesn't have any other leverage here - but Github does have other options than holding onto the cat.
Instead they play "data roach motel" and hold your data hostage. Very uncool.