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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

Huge fan of how Unity put the terms of service in a public GitHub repo. Do other organizations do this?

They actually did this when they had a public spat with Improbable and stealth-changed the ToS to forbid Improbable's use of Unity. When called out, Unity posted the ToS to GitHub as a promise of transparency going forward.

They deleted the repo it a few months before rolling out the runtime fee and published it again after being called out.

So it's great in concept, but we've already seen it completely ignored in practice.

Finally a legit use case for blockchain

Because they couldn't just also move off of the blockchain?

Use legaleese to fight legaleese, just write in the ToS itself only the blockchain version is applicable. If they want to move off they at least have to update the blockchain version to remove the blockchain requirement for applicability.

Why couldn't they do the same with Github, then? What problem does the blockchain actually solve that git (or just a website) wouldn't?

They could of course just do that, so there is no benefit from it being in block chain compared with anywhere else.

The only advantage block chain provides is you don't have to trust anyone. Eg you don't have to trust GitHub to not delete or modify the repo themselves, but they weren't any part of the problem here.

Blockchain history cannot be manipulated unlike in git. This was meant as a joke though. There’s other ways to achieve this besides blockchain. the internet archive way back machine can pull up the TOS on a certain date.

Here’s some more info on file deletion using git and blockchain: https://chatgpt.com/share/67096e57-d6e0-8004-9f68-ae646bb471...

Git is a blockchain

At least it worked as a ToS canary. The repo goes down, and you know shenanigans are incoming.

Not sure how much good that does. Git history is mutable.

It's also tamper-evident. Forks would detect the rewrite.

I have no idea how GitHub handles this. If I fork a repo through the GH GUI, the source repo rewrites history-is mine impacted? I assume GitHub does all sorts of tricks to minimize materializing data changes unless required. My “fork” could just be a pointer to the now mutated origin.

If this changes in the source repo and you try to reconcile from your unmodified base you'll be in for some bad surprises (things like "no common history" errors in the worst of cases). This is the reasons why you have to be careful with things that change branch pointers like squashing merges.

i would like to see this work somehow. the whole modal click thru as part of bootup; install; or update is really old.

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