Gfrktyl

I logged into GitHub today and found something new I hadn't seen before:

What is this, and why did it begin to appear?

PRO tag refers to https://github.com/pro

GitHub today (07.01.2019) announced that it is changing the name of the GitHub Developer suite to GitHub Pro. The company says it’s doing so in order to "help developers better identify the tools they need".

In other words, all Pro (and Edu) users have that PRO tag.

Honorable mention: Historically GitHub always offered free accounts but the caveat was that your code had to be public. To get private repositories, you had to pay. Starting tomorrow, that limitation is gone. Free GitHub users now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators. The amount of collaborators is really the only limitation here and there’s no change to how the service handles public repositories, which can still have unlimited collaborators.

Some say, this may or may not be the result of Microsoft's closed acquisition of GitHub last October, with former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman taking over as the CEO of GitHub. Some developers were rather nervous about the acquisition (though it feels like most have come to terms with it). It’s also a fair guess to assume that GitHub’s model for monetizing the service is a bit different from Microsoft’s. Microsoft doesn’t need to try to get money from small teams - that’s not where the bulk of its revenue comes from. Instead, the company is mostly interested in getting large enterprises to use the service.

Someone who has the pro plan on github https://github.com/pricing
or someone who is on an educational plan, because you get pro privileges.

This update came with the "New year, new GitHub" blog post.

It indicates you got the "GitHub Pro" plan. (it used to be called "GitHub Developer" pack)

GitHub Developer is now called GitHub Pro. It includes everything in GitHub Free, unlimited collaborators for private repositories, and advanced code review tools for private and public repositories.

If you got the Github Education pack (student developer pack) then it means you're also a GitHub Pro user.

GitHub free now gives you unlimited private repositories up to three collaborators per repository.

Either you have paid for the pro plan to GitHub or you have verified institutional email address, both can have this PRO label on their profile page.

That is because of GitHub changing the name of the GitHub Developer suite to GitHub Pro.

The "PRO" badge will appear when you get a paid GitHub plan or if you sign up for the student developer pack.

Check the story here: New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repositories and unified Enterprise offering (2019-01-07)

They just changed the name of Developer pack to Pro, I've got the same badge as I was enrolled in developer/education pack (either you got this because you got a student pack or you paid before for such plan)

It worths mentioning that student/education pack needs school's email verification and provides a lot of free features, credits, service, or subscriptions not only from Github but from different well known organizations like Bitnami, Amazon, DigitalOcean, JetBrains, Stripe, Heroku .. etc .. More details could be found here

They used to sell private repos feature before, earlier this year they announced unlimited free private repos and unified enterprise offering.

Beside Free and Pro plans, Github offers Team and Enterprise plans. here is more details of feature comparisons along with prices for each plan.