We regularly update our policies to reflect the evolution of our products, changing legal requirements, and user feedback. In this update, we’ve made some changes to our Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, and other site policies. We’ve also made some updates to the process for updating our site policies.
We welcome your feedback in our site-policy repository, where we’ve open sourced the policies that govern the use of GitHub.com. We periodically open pull requests in our site-policy repository to develop and make updates collaboratively with our community.
These updates will become effective on November 16, after a 30-day notice and comment period.
We’ve proposed updates to our Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Corporate Terms of Service, Enterprise Subscription Agreement, Enterprise Service Level Agreement, Acceptable Use Policies, and Community Guidelines to make clarifications to our terms, harmonize language across policies, and reflect new products and features.
These site policy updates include:
We create and maintain our site policies as an open source project, and we continually review and modify the policies in this repository. Our review and modification process allows for discussion about upcoming changes before they go into effect and lets our community rely on our policies.
Until now, we had been grouping updates together in a semiannual review period with a 30-day comment period for changes, unless they were typos or related to a product ship. We did this to give our community time to provide feedback. Over time, we found that we tend to get feedback soon after we post the changes, and keeping the comment period open unnecessarily delayed shipping useful clarifications and updates to our users.
Going forward, in most cases, when we open a pull request to propose an update, we’ll leave it open for 24 hours before the changes go into effect. For material changes to our Privacy Statement, Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policies, Corporate Terms of Service, and Enterprise Subscription Agreement, we’ll post the updates 30 days before they go into effect, as stated in those documents.
Comments on and review of our pull requests are welcome, just like in any open source project.
We update our policies in this way for a few main reasons:
We welcome input on the policies (in our site-policy repository) at any time. We’re open to your feedback to make our site policies the best versions they can be.
The comment period starts today and ends on November 16, at 5 pm PT. We’ll review any comments we receive and carefully consider making further improvements before merging any new changes. Updates will go into effect on November 16.
You can also repurpose our project for your team if you’re shaping policies for an organization. Since our policies in the site-policy repository are all licensed CC0, you’re welcome to fork a copy to adapt for your own use. If our project helped you create policy foundations for your organization, we’d love to hear about it as well.
Access to the open internet is essential to defending human rights, and developers have an important role in promoting freedom of expression and transparency. GitHub is committed to keeping Iranians connected to the global developer community.
The ReadME Project & Podcast evolve with community expert voices and topics to stoke discussion about the culture and craft of software development.
As the home for developers, we understand the key role our communities play in steering digital transformation and maintaining societal infrastructure. That's why we choose to drive and support policies and initiatives like the Copenhagen Pledge on Tech for Democracy. We're committed to working with like-minded organizations, governments, and civil society to make digital technologies work for democracy and human rights, and we encourage you to join us in this pledge.
Abby Vollmer 
