Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Contradictory license information on Terms of Service page #1014

Closed
ColinM9991 opened this issue Jan 3, 2025 · 2 comments
Closed

Contradictory license information on Terms of Service page #1014

ColinM9991 opened this issue Jan 3, 2025 · 2 comments

Comments

@ColinM9991
Copy link

Please read our README.md and CONTRIBUTING.md files before creating an issue. If you are creating an issue to provide feedback about our Closed Policies, please note that we may not incorporate your feedback into our policies due to laws that limit our flexibility around those issues. If your feedback is not related to any of the questions below, feel free to delete the template questions and enter your comments in free form.

1. What's the name of the policy?

Terms of Service

2. Is this issue related to a specific section within one of our policies (e.g. the Terms of Service)? If so, please include a link to the section or subsection.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-terms-of-service#5-license-grant-to-other-users

3. Did you already open a pull request? If so, please include a link to the PR in the GitHub Docs repo.

No PR opened

4. Sometimes it's easier to just put your feedback text into an issue. If that's how you'd prefer to contribute, this is the section to do that.

The GitHub Terms of Service, namely the License Grant to Other Users section contradicts the information outlined on the GitHub Licensing page

The specific contradicting quotes are, from the Terms of Service

Any User-Generated Content you post publicly, including issues, comments, and contributions to other Users' repositories, may be viewed by others. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and "fork" your repositories (this means that others may make their own copies of Content from your repositories in repositories they control).

Compared to the content on the Licensing page

You're under no obligation to choose a license. However, without a license, the default copyright laws apply, meaning that you retain all rights to your source code and no one may reproduce, distribute, or create derivative works from your work

This is cross-posted from github/docs#35571

5. Why do you think this section or language needs improvement?

This is confusing and it's not immediately clear whether a fork and derivative is or is not allowed for a public repository in which the developers have not explicitly selected a license. Which takes precedence here - the inherited copyright or the terms of service?

@margaret-tucker
Copy link
Contributor

margaret-tucker commented Feb 3, 2025

Hi @ColinM9991, thanks for taking the time to provide us feedback on our site policies! I'll review this and get back to you

@jessephus
Copy link
Contributor

Hi @ColinM9991 — If someone creates a fork of a project that does not have a license, GitHub’s Terms of Service only grant them the right to maintain that unaltered fork on the GitHub platform. Any additional rights would need to be granted by license. This is explained in Section D.5 of our Terms of Service:

If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub’s functionality (for example, through forking). You may grant further rights if you adopt a license. If you are uploading Content you did not create or own, you are responsible for ensuring that the Content you upload is licensed under terms that grant these permissions to other GitHub Users.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

4 participants
@jessephus @ColinM9991 @margaret-tucker and others