venerdì 27 maggio 2011

GitHub & licensing

Today I signed up for GitHub , the most famous Git-based on-line repository. Being involved in a few Open Source projects I signed up for the free account, and I noted two statements in the license agreement (do you read the license agreements when you sign up for something, don't you?) that pleased me a lot:
D.2 All of your Content will be immediately deleted from the Service upon cancellation. This information can not be recovered once your account is cancelled.

In contrast with a lot of other online services (not only related to source code management), GitHub assuers me that once I click "delete" all the copies of my work will be deleted, very good!
F.1 We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. However, by setting your pages to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view your Content. By setting your repositories to be viewed publicly, you agree to allow others to view and fork your repositories.

So not only they will not keep "unauthorized" copies of my work, but they will not use my intellectual property as it was their property. In other words, GitHub will work as a "simple" network storage system for my code. That was what I was searching for.

SourceForge has similar terms, and in particular it does not claim any right on the intellectual property:
(from http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sitelegal/wiki/Terms_of_Use)
You retain your ownership rights to any and all of Your Content. Geeknet claims no ownership of any Content you submit to Geeknet. You or your third party licensor, as applicable, retain all intellectual property rights to any Content and you are responsible for protecting those rights, as appropriate.


but has a strange term for user deletion:
(from http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/sourceforge/wiki/Removing a user account)
When an account is removed, the account name is not released back in to available name space. Under current policy, the deleted account name will not be reallocated to a new user.
Data created by the user on the site (such as forum posts, Tracker tickets, etc.) will remain intact, and will continue to be attributed to the account, even after the account has been removed.

It seems that a deleted account is simply denied to login again, but all the stuff remains there, even the account itself (otherwise there would be no reason to not push back the nickname on the available name space!).

I'm not saying that one system is better than the other, I'm just pointing your attention to a couple of things that seems interesting to me.

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