That's even more true with a dedicated work github account than a mixed personal/work one; either way they can still login and edit the account name even if removed from the company org, and if it's not shared it doesn't burn their personal account too... right?
With a dedicated work account the organization can always take over the account (via reset email if need be, since they own your work email account) and do whatever they want with it
One option for those so inclined is to cryptographically sign commits with a key that lists both work and personal email address (assuming your enterprise’s policy allows it). The employer retains control but you have a claim to credit for your work.
If we're discussing companies willing to go to lengths to scrub you from their GitHub history, they can still replace all commits you've signed with new commits. You likely have no legal rights to that work, and git does allow you to rewrite history arbitrarily.
It depends on the jurisdiction. In the US, copyright assignment is usually permanent. In the EU and Canada, you can claw back your rights to a degree and even revoke the usage altogether, if you manage to claw it back because they did "evil" things with it (moral rights).
In some cases (even in the US), if the employer does something that would be considered a "breach of contract", you can force them to remove all your code as well.
So, it would not be in the company's best interest to scrub their git history.
I think even in the EU and Canada, you don't have any copyright interest in work your perform as part of your employment. The copyright on the work you produce for your employer is entirely theirs, from the moment it is created.
Now, if you're a contractor performing work for a company, this may be quite different. But as an employee, I don't think you have any claim of authorship to the code you right as part of your job.
Sure, but the same is true for unsigned commits as well, isn't it? Or can you modify the commit metadata without changing the commit hash in those cases?
My question was, is signing the commits really useful? Isn't it just as hard or easy to scrub you from the repo history regardless of whether the commits are signed or not?
If a spiteful ex-employer wants to scrub ex-employee authorship from the entire commit history in their public repos when someone leaves I don't think there's anything you could do to stop that either way, though it seems like it would be more trouble than it's worth and likely wouldn't scale. If they don't do that, assuming your old company email address still has your name in it I don't see why you'd lose credit for the work you did.
Is this speaking from experience?