Open sourcing our site policies and new changes to our Terms of Service

You’re invited to watch, fork, and collaborate on GitHub’s Terms of Service and other site policies. Back in March we open sourced our Balanced Employee IP Agreement. The feedback from the community has been amazing. Not only have you given us comments and suggestions to make the agreement better, we’ve also heard anecdotes of other companies taking inspiration from it.

Now we’re continuing to harness the power of open source by opening up our GitHub.com site policies in a new working repository, github/site-policy. Here you can view, comment, and suggest changes to our site policies—or fork a copy to adapt for your own site. Along with this new repository, we’re also posting changes to our Terms of Service for public comment.

Why open source site policies?

Save time and money. Although essential for any online service, site policies can be time intensive and expensive to create. We hope that by opening up our privately and publicly vetted policies, your startup will be able to cut down on some of those legal fees.

Improve and iterate. Iteration makes things even better. With the help of our community, we can improve on and build policies that work best for everyone. We welcome your issues and pull requests.

Comment on new changes. Changes to our site policies can have a huge impact on you. The new repository is the perfect way to let us know how. Whenever we have significant changes, we’ll post them as a pull request. From there, you can see the updates and easily leave comments or feedback.

Give it a try: comment on changes to our Terms of Service

To get you started, we have a new set of changes to our Terms of Service and Corporate Terms of Service. Feel free to look them over and try out the new Site Policy repository to share your input. Please follow our Contributor Guidelines, and let us know if you see anything you think should be different—whether it’s a missed typo or a rule that might have implications we haven’t thought of.

An overview of changes to our site Terms

• Updates to GitHub Terms of Service: Added a “Private Repositories” section as Section E, updated the licenses granted in Section D for clarity, and updated the Complete Agreement subsection in Section S, “Miscellaneous”
• Updates to GitHub Corporate Terms of Service: Added a “Private Repositories” section as Section E, updated the licenses granted in Section D for clarity, updated the Complete Agreement subsection, and added a Publicity subsection to Section S, “Miscellaneous”
• Added a product description to the GitHub Business Plan Addendum
• Updated the Amendment to GitHub Terms of Service Applicable to U.S. Federal Government Users to reflect previous changes to notification policy

We’ll leave comments open until 5:00 pm PST Friday, July 28. Then we’ll take a week to go through your comments and make changes to improve the Terms. We’ll enact the new Terms on Monday, August 7.

Sound interesting? Check out the github/site-policy repository to learn more, and share your feedback. We’d love to hear if our project is useful to you in creating foundations for your own business.

Written by

Joe Mazzella

@bluemazzoo