Aspiring to communicate with developers as well as Apple does is a perverse goal. Microsoft for example has a status page for their browser work [1] just like Google does for Chrome [2]. (The Microsoft page lets people vote for their favorite features, the Chrome one does it via stars on their tickets.) Something like either of those from Github would be great.
Dunno, the ocean can send back your tennis balls. They'll be went, they may take a long time and they may come back on a different beach altogether, but there's a chance.
ROTFL. I report only when they have really annoying bugs and still don't condone their way of hiding issues from other (paying) users inside a private system. They answer after weeks, if they do, and then they expect me to retest next day. Sorry, but that's not gonna work.
Not true, sometimes they respond with "we'll look at it for the next major release in 2 years". I've seen that on a lot of 5-year-old items that are still broken.
I will grant you that. At the same time, it is a horrible benchmark and it is even more deadly when you compare github, a company, among many, that offers hosting to a monopoly that you can't easily move away from.
But Apple has a reputation of not saying anything outside of the big releases and for the most part didn't have to be responsive because the periodic hype usually drowned out any criticism.
GitHub on the other hand largely owes its reputation to how it is perceived by open source communities. Their perceived value is based less on the quality of their product(s) and more on being the place all open source projects live (moreso than even SourceForge ever was -- even companies like Google and Microsoft have moved their open source projects to GitHub simply because that's where developers expect open source projects to live).
Apple can get by largely on marketing and the perceived quality of their products. GitHub relies on open source projects, even if they don't make any money of them directly. Hosting open source projects is just an advertising expense.
If the majority of noteworthy open source projects left GitHub (especially if they left to the same platform, e.g. GitLab.com or BitBucket) their reputation as "the place where open source projects live" would evaporate and they'd have to fight the same friction for new users as their competitors. Additionally they'd probably become less interesting for third-party integrations as they can no longer serve as a cheap showcase for those products/services. This would again harm their appeal to paid users.
