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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

The GitHub ToS is not a software license. It is the terms for using the GitHub service. The penalty for breaking it is that your GitHub services might be terminated, not that they can somehow relicense your software.

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This part of the ToS explicitly does grant such a license to other GitHub users.

> If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking).

As written, this says that you can fork a repo but can’t then clone it and work on it on your own machine. Isn’t software licensing fun?

Interesting. I guess you could just stick to the Github web editor to stay compliant? Really a terrible way to go about things though

I was thinking that. The language seems not quite clear, at least to a non-lawyer like me:

> you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking)

So, on GitHub, we can "use", "perform", and "reproduce". Does editing/modifying fall under any of those verbs?

You also can’t run the code.

Hmm, it says not to distribute the source or the binary. What about WASM or LLVM IR?

If GH provides they capability I suppose.

Cloning is part of GitHub's functionality, so therefore we can clone it but can only commit those changes back to GH. We are permitted to do anything that is part of GH's functionality.

It would seem that Github's TOS is superior to their license. They could have chosen other way to host their code

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