Github recently drafted an update to their Terms Of Service. The new TOS is potentially very bad for copylefted Free Software. It potentially neuters it entirely, so GPL licensed software hosted on Github has an implicit BSD-like license. I'll leave the full analysis to the lawyers, but see Thorsten's analysis.
I contacted Github about this weeks ago, and received only an anodyne response. The Free Software Foundation was also talking with them about it. It seems that Github doesn't care or has some reason to want to effectively neuter copyleft software licenses.
The possibility that a Github TOS change could force a change to the license of your software hosted there, and that it's complicated enough that I'd have to hire a lawyer to know for sure, makes Github not worth bothering to use.
Github's value proposition was never very high for me, and went negative now.
I am deleting my repositories from Github at this time. If you used the Github mirrors for git-annex, propellor, ikiwiki, etckeeper, myrepos, click on the links for the non-Github repos (git.joeyh.name also has mirrors). Also, github-backup has a new website and repository off of github. (There's an oncoming severe weather event here, so it may take some time before I get everything deleted and cleaned up.)
[Some commits to git-annex were pushed to Github this morning by an automated system, but I had NOT accepted their new TOS at that point, and explicitly do NOT give Github or anyone any rights to git-annex not granted by its GPL and AGPL licenses.]
See also: PDF of Github TOS that can be read without being forced to first accept Github's TOS
Hello,
do you know of any way to leave a pointer on github to the new location?
You are famous :-) so you can just put the links in your blog, but if anyone at all cares about my hacks they won't find it unless I tell them there.
But I couldn't find any way - the "bio" is only twitter-size, and there's no other text field I see that's independent of the repos themselves so it would survive their removal.
Thanks.
I don't know of any good way to do it. Ideally, git would have a way to signal a redirect from one mirror of a repository to another one, and could learn the new url.
I have created empty repos on github with the same names as the deleted ones, and in their README put the url to use. Not an ideal solution as it could confuse people and scripts.
In my case, all the projects were not hosted on github, only mirrored there (except for github-backup). So, googling will find their websites and git repos still.
The Link to "See also: PDF of Github TOS that can be read without being forced to first accept Github's TOS" is giving a 404 error.
Any copy of the document somewhere?
I have a copy somewhere but I'm sure the TOS has changed in the meantime.
It's Github's problem that they have a TOS that you automatically "accept" before you can see it. I am not going to try to help them fix that problem, beyond pointing it out.