

Ask HN: Are you aware of GitHub's TOS and are you OK with that? - cgtyoder

From Github&#x27;s TOS (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;help.github.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;github-terms-of-service):<p>• GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice.<p>• GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.<p>If you use GH for Real Work, are you OK with these terms?  Personally, that makes them unreliable and therefore unusable.  Do people (a) find that not an issue; (b) cross their fingers and hope that never happens; (c) only use GitHub for git version control and therefore would be only a relatively minor inconvenience; (d) something else?
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RyanGWU82
Is there any service provider whose TOS compels them to provide service
unconditionally to the general public? If you were running an SaaS service,
wouldn't you want some recourse if a customer was abusing your service?

If you're a large customer and you're really concerned, you can probably
negotiate a contract with GitHub that guarantees your access to the service.
But if you're a large enough customer to warrant a custom contract, then no
rational service provider would unexpectedly cut you off, because your
business is valuable to them.

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cgtyoder
It's not about providing service unconditionally - it's about have Reasonable
(IMO) terms which don't give them license to turn you off whenever they want.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable to specify they will do that if you
were abusing resources, doing something illegal, being malicious, etc. - there
needs to be some limits on when they get to shut me down. I can't consider it
in any way reliable otherwise.

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EdwardMSmith
And, how would you phrase that in a legal document like a terms of service?

Who determines "abuse of resources"? Who determines "being malicious".

If the sole determination of whether somebody is crossing the line for
termination lies in Github, then the legal result is exactly what currently
exists in the terms of service.

If Github does not have the sole discretion to make the determination of
abuse, then who does? A third party mediator?

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jgroszko
If github goes down/becomes evil wouldn't it be trivial to just push your repo
to another host? I guess there's other things that might tie you into their
ecosystem, like wiki/issue tracking/static hosting, but git itself makes it
pretty easy to just push elsewhere...

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cgtyoder
Yes… if you're only using it for git version control. If you're using svn or
any other features of GH, you will be in deep yogurt.

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JoachimSchipper
You can create dumps of remote subversion repositories, which can be used to
recreate the repository. (Google suggests that this is called svnrdump; it's
been a while since I seriously used svn.)

I admit that this isn't widely known, and that many people will actually be in
trouble; but if you're prepared, you don't have to be.

~~~
cgtyoder
This of course is only as good as your last 'svnrdump'. And that still doesn't
really address the underlying issue.

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sbank
Yes I am. It is a private company, and they can do whatever they damn well
please. This is just standard TOS language.

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rpedela
Almost every internet company has similar language in their TOS.

