Pure coincidence. We were working for two years to get this license.
4,377 karma · joined July 19, 2009
Hi everyone, thanks for all the enthusiasm about this change. We are happy to have removed cookie banners from GitHub, and not to participate in third-party tracking of user behavior.
Our privacy policies and subprocessor list will be updated next week following our customary 30 day user notice period. We do this in the open in a pull request, so you can see the changes now:
It’s also open source: https://github.com/github/site-policy/blob/main/Policies/dmc...
GitHub hasn't been hacked. We accidentally shipped an un-stripped/obfuscated tarball of our GitHub Enterprise Server source code to some customers a couple of months ago. It shares code with github.com. As others have pointed out, much of GitHub is written in Ruby.
Git makes it trivial to impersonate unsigned commits, so we recommend people sign their commits and look for the 'verified' label on GitHub to ensure that things are as they appear to be.
As for repo impersonation – stay tuned, we are going to make it much more obvious when you're viewing an orphaned commit.
In summary: everything is fine, situation normal, the lark is on the wing, the snail is on the thorn, and all's right with the world.
Dark mode is coming. The foundational work we are doing first is to replace all our custom HTML and CSS with components that are more readily themable. This will also help us improve accessibility, and help us replace our mobile web site with a fully responsive UI.
Also – I don't think there is a principle of lowering information density at work here. I think it's just a design that we will keep iterating. We are pro information density at GitHub.
I wasn't aware of SS13, and will look into what happened there. Content moderation at GitHub scale is hard and sometimes mistakes are made.
As for how we sustain ourselves -- lots of big enterprise customers!
I think open sourcing GitHub is an interesting idea.
We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.
We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).
In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.
For context on why any account flagging is ever necessary, unfortunately, every company in the world is required to comply with US sanctions if they do any business at all in the United States, e.g. serving US-based customers. This includes even interacting with US banking infrastructure. So being headquartered somewhere else doesn't help; you have to comply. And US sanctions as written do not allow us to provide commercial services or services which could be used commercially to sanctioned countries.
We are taking the broadest possible interpretation of US sanctions law to allow as much access to GitHub as possible and we are, as far as I know, the only major vendor to offer public repo access in US-sanctioned countries like Iran, Syria, and Cuba. I'm proud that we are taking this strong position to ensure developers everywhere can participate in open source.
I wish we could also offer access to private repos and still comply with government requirements. We have been advocating and will continue to advocate for broader developer access with the various government agencies involved.
https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1109880047207235589?s...