New GitHub Terms of Service

We’re in the process of updating our Terms of Service, and we’d like to get your input on the draft of our new Terms.

Why the change?

In short, our current Terms of Service agreement could do a better job of answering your questions about how our service works. We’ve heard your feedback, and we’re updating our Terms to make them less ambiguous and easier to read so that you know what you’re agreeing to.

An overview of the new Terms

In general, this update lets us do a better job of putting our current business practices in clearer terms for our users. Some of the changes you’ll find in the new Terms of Service:

• Reading the Terms: You’ll find a table of contents, as well as a summary of every section in plain English.
• Acceptable Use: We have clarified our Acceptable Use Policy, including our policy on scraping and misuse of GitHub Users’ personal information.
• Ownership of Content: We don’t claim any ownership rights to the content you upload to GitHub. What’s yours is yours. In the new Terms, however, we have added an explicit license to clarify our right to store and serve it without violating your rights.
• Default Contributor License: To address growing confusion over licensing and contributions to others’ projects, we added a simple default contributor license. If it does not suit your needs, you may add your own Contributor License Agreement to your repository.
• GitHub Pages terms: We have clarified our rules regarding GitHub Pages.
• Advertising on GitHub: Advertising is not prohibited on GitHub, but it is heavily scrutinized because we don’t want to become a spam haven. Our Terms now describe the kind of advertising that GitHub allows.

Taking action

We want your input. Please look over our new Terms, compare them to our old Terms if you want to, and tell us what you think via the new Terms of Service contact form. Let us know if you see anything you think should be different, whether it’s a typo we missed or a rule that might have implications we haven’t thought of.

We’ll leave comments open until 5:00pm (PST) Tuesday, February 21. Then, we’ll take a week to go through your comments, make whatever changes will improve the Terms, and we’ll enact the new Terms on Tuesday, February 28.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Written by

Hannah Poteat

@nsqe