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Comment by GauntletWizard | Hacker News Reader

Github has already stumbled, and will fall soon. Their gaffes in conduct[1] and content[2] policies are already dividing the community. For a company that has thrived on being a monoculture, this spells doom.

[1] https://np.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3e5c6f/why_the_... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118

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You seriously think censoring the word "retard" will harm their business?

I think you should think twice before investing or hosting data with companies that engage in tit-for-tat infantile behavior.

Of course not, try not to think in such black and white terms. Missteps like these sow the seeds of disdain for companies. Developers are a fickle bunch, and easily hold grudges.

I don't think the loss of patronage of the set of developers willing to choose their tools based on whether they as a company allow their users to slur large groups of people is really on their radar.

I don't, but what I believe could worry many (especially business users) is the idea of needing to rapidly enact a change within 24 hours to not have a repo or even your entire account deleted. This is assuming https://imgur.com/QC51FZz is even true, though.

Let's assume for a moment that email is true: how many businesses have policies that allow their staff to use language in that particular way?

And Github, like most other providers, have catch-all clauses in the ToS. This one, perhaps:

> We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.

I suppose my point is that if you're a business you shouldn't rely on Github etc.

I 100% believe GitHub has the right to police and enforce their own standards on their system - just wanted to make that clear first. This is not about the r-word issue for me.

What I find unsettling is that what they could consider "objectionable" is wide open and resolution of raised issues is expected so rapidly. Silly story time..

A developer in MajorCorp leaves a code comment (which is eventually committed) saying "// TODO: Fix this later, GitHub is down again, GitHub is trash!". GitHub could fairly request its removal as it is likely to be objectionable to them.

However, the main contact on the account is away at a conference and gets to their email a couple of days later. Is their repo or even their entire account now toast? How much would someone want to bet against that?

This is a farfetched contrived story, but now there's a demonstrated (again, assuming the screenshot is legit) attempt to enforce this clause and evidence of "24 hours" being the timeframe allowed for resolution, the tiny risk of such an outcome is going to hit sentiment and get legal departments twitching.

(My personal suspicion is paying and enterprise users will not receive such threats, but in the above example I'm being idealistic and assuming everyone gets equal treatment.)

Most cloud services can be pulled from your business at any time for any reason. This includes gmail and Facebook, and also payment processors.

(Personally I can't understand hosting your source code offsite in the first place if you're a business and not an open source project, but it seems to be popular)

Okay, but this is again about single points of failure. Don't have just one person who is able to make the changes, don't rely on Github.

I agree that the ToS clause is very broad, and that (if the email is real) that the timeframe is short.

But that seems to be standard across different providers.

For example, Google will close several types of account without warning.

I learned about this before it became front page news here, and personally confirmed the repo was made unavailable for a while. That and its return is entirely consistent with the supposed email.

Well, it cost them my $7/mo. That decision was very disturbing to me - I've always viewed GitHub as a content-neutral platform which provided a code hosting and sharing service. Yesterday's incident seems to signal that they are willing to make political judgments about peoples' code and force their opinions into that code, and I'm just really not okay with that. This wasn't about removing something which posed a legal or material threat to GitHub or its users - this was about controlling expression to force compliance with a political agenda. Which, by the way, GitHub is well within its rights to do, but which I find extraordinarily distasteful.

I'm not willing to say it "will fall soon", but it has substantially damaged my opinion of GitHub as a company, and has diminished my trust in the integrity of their service as it serves the needs of open-source communities.

In exchange, I've started actively patronizing businesses that choose not to make "Lets indulge all speech ever!" as they hill they want to die on.

That's...rather quite a strawman. There is a huge chasm between "Let's indulge all speech ever!" and "Let's not force compliance to our political opinions on our users".

I suspect what you mean is that you are actively patronizing businesses who reinforce your current political beliefs; I doubt very much that you are patronizing businesses who engage in censorship which runs contrary to your political beliefs out of some idealistic respect for their courage to take a stand. And that's fine - we all naturally tend to support those we agree with, and not support those we disagree with - but framing it as admiration of the will to censor is just almost certainly spurious.

The way the narrative is currently framed is "Let's indulge all speech ever!".

And what you suspect is incorrect. This decision is largely driven by finding them more pleasant environments rather than my current political beliefs. If that were the case, I wouldn't be patronizing GitHub. Nor would I have had had lunch at Chick-fil-a.

What if I put other expletives in code comments....? Will I be banned too?

I strongly disagree. These look more like intentional signals to indicate that they're trying to shed the kind of behaviour they had become known for previously[0][1].

It's understandable that they're concerned about how the "feminist community" sees them. They're this generation's SourceForge and "feminist" backed shitstorms against them are likely posing a considerable risk to their brand. Just look at Gittip[2] (now Gratipay)[3].

[0]: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Category:GitHub

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2605739

[2]: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Gittip_crisis

[3]: Gratipay lives and they had to change business models for unrelated reasons but I'm fairly certain the "crisis" has an impact on their brand and growth even if it didn't outright kill them.

I don't know that censoring a few words is enough to cause them to lose momentum, but I have similar concerns. What is the compelling advantage of using github instead of gitorious or gitlab or whatever? They have a few nice tools, but nothing that can't be replicated. And if there's no significant advantage, then they're only one data breach or PR fail from losing tons of customers. The very nature of git means they can't get user lock-in.

Network effects. There's entire subcultures that have de facto clustered themselves onto GitHub, like the Erlang community. Most web developers, as well.

You're right the actual GitHub interface is not as amazing as it is often heralded. I've always thought the issue tracker was a joke, for instance.

The issue tracker is absolutely a joke, but being a standard for company codebases is a huge moat. If it works well enough, what company wants to spend time moving a codebase/history.

I speak this as someone who managed developers at a company that was still using CVS. And yes, we discussed moving to git every so often, but it always was lower on my priorities than new features.

is this why github's been doing the censoring and making it a "safe" place? to appeal to a broader audience and please the investors? similar to what reddit recently went through

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

Enterprise Customers cannot (and will not) attempt to transition from hosting hundreds (in some cases, thousands) of private repositories on gitHub in favor of another service.

The alternative would have to aggressively undercut gitHub's enterprise sales model while competing with gitHub's uptime.

Customers aren't going anywhere.

No "Enterprise Customer" is using github without a fallback plan. Github is in no way stable enough to rely on for business-critical work; fortunately, git is distributed and cnames exist, so it's easy to seamlessly fall back to competent hosting as needed.

Github has a standalone server you can run inside your own firewall. Thats where their big bucks come from and most likely what the commenter meant by enterprise.

https://enterprise.github.com/home

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