Non-profit organizations still have a mission that they need to protect, and they almost always have <i>revenue</i> they care about, though not <i>profit</i>.<p>Private repos are a good way to review code for things like plaintext passwords and service keys before it&#x27;s in production. If a developer commits something with a key, and code review goes &quot;Oh, you shouldn&#x27;t have put that there,&quot; and it was public, now you have to rekey. Private repos allow that code review step to take place.<p>(They&#x27;re also pretty useful for legacy code where eliminating all the private keys is difficult and not an immediate priority, and for the rare but existent cases where including private keys in source is the right engineering tradeoff for <i>new</i> development.)<p>There&#x27;s also no way to disable pull requests and other outside comments on your code, other than making a private repo. Having it private is a simple way to avoid inviting the public to have opinions all over your repo.