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Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

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Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#131
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what? Private doesn't imply (common sense) that the original repository has power over any fork.

That is the exact meaning, which does seem to be common sense. You can fork from a public, private or internal repo. Public is public and the fork won't get deleted when the repo removes you. Private deletes your fork, since it isn't your repo. Internal requires gated access.

for me the exact meaning for private is "available for a selected audience"

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#132
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the exact meaning, which does seem to be common sense. You can fork from a public, private or internal repo. Public is public and the fork won't get deleted when the repo removes you. Private deletes your fork, since it isn't your repo. Internal requires gated access.

for me the exact meaning for private is "available for a selected audience"

Exactly. That implies that when a person is removed from the selected audience, they lose access to the private code.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#133
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mentioned in another post that the company only released a cleaned up version publicly. That cleaned up code which they published is clearly and unambiguously under the MIT license. Any other modifications that were made and not published (including any you made in your fork as an employee) are not automatically licensed as MIT. Your employer holds the copyright to that. They might be fine with those internal cha…

If the private repo had the MIT license in it, then it was licensed with the MIT license, regardless of how widely or publicly the repo was distributed.

It isn't that clear-cut. A license is a legal grant of rights from the copyright holder to the licensee. A license file is just documentation. A repo can have different parts that are covered by difference licenses and there are different ways to mark the licenses, whether in the text of each file itself, or other top-level files that document the status. It is also fine for internal working copies to not have all their licensing documentation perfectly applied the instant a file is created. In particular, in many companies, individual software developers don't have authority to license software on behalf of the company who owns the copyright, and so any markings they place in the repo are just tentative drafts pending legal review. So in the context of a private working copy, the existence of a license file doesn't have a ton of legal weight. What matters is when the copyright holder chooses to grant a license, via whomever the company gives authority to do so.

Once the organization publishes the software to others, whatever license documentation they include with it is binding, unless other issues trump that (like them not holding the copyright to begin with).

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#134
post #123

I'm not sure why people are defending Github on this issue, what if the original repo was a template or something, and your thousands of lines of code is gone because the original template repo removed you as a contributor. If I copy something, I expect where I copied it from to have exactly zero bearing on what happens to my copy. If they have a problem they can serve legal documents, giving everyone time to figure…

Guess I’ll be cloning repos locally and then pushing instead of forking.

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the "main" branch an advantage? I guess only if >50 percent of your repos use "main" branch

[flagged]

That is an awful lot of contortions you are doing here, to seemingly justify a word change that has had well-cemented meaning within the tech community since it's inception.

We all know why this change exists, and why some people will attempt to persuade others of it's superiority. It is, however, just silly virtue signaling, and it's exhausting to hear and read.

It would require some very irrational and underdeveloped reasoning to assert this word has anything to do with oppression in 2023. There is no negative connotation, except in those who wish to perpetuate some weird sensation of altruism... ie. no one is safer or feels better simply because you choose to call it "main" rather than "master".

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#136
If you have a Raspberry Pi wasting away in a drawer[0], I strongly recommend installing Gitea or Forgejo and mirroring all the repos you like (i.e. the ones you contribute(d) to and/or starred, not just on Github too!). You set it up once and it will sync in upstream changes as often as you like (default is daily)

0. Or a homelab, or a cheap 256MB VM, or a NAS that can run docker containers, or an old Chromebook: anything that can execute a Go binary, x64, arm6 or even mips

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so what? Private doesn't imply (common sense) that the original repository has power over any fork.

It does, otherwise github just wouldn't allow forking private repositories. If they did allow that, and retained no control over the forked copy, now you can ride a coach and horses through the access control to a private repo by simply forking it when you have access. My guess is that forking a private repository is a feature github intended to be used where employees or contractors of an enterprise want to fork the…

" If they did allow that, and retained no control over the forked copy, now you can ride a coach and horses through the access control to a private repo by simply forking it when you have access. "

Actually that's not really true, since your access to the original repository could still be revoked, and you are left with what you got.

Further, see sibling comment.

"My guess is that forking a private repository is a feature github intended to be used where employees or contractors of an enterprise want to fork their employer's repository as part of their development activities for that employer."

what you describe is "internal visibility"

https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/creating-and-managin...

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It will only be deleted if the repo you fork from is a private repository This makes sense. Thank you for clarifying that important detail. It seems to be missing from the parts of the discussion I've read here.

No, it doesn't. It only makes sense until you stop and go "Wait, no, hold on a minute. Why would they delete the fork instead of simply severing the fork relation in their fork relations table?".

[dead]

Re: Tell HN: GitHub will delete your private repo if you lose access to the original

#139
post #123

I'm not sure why people are defending Github on this issue, what if the original repo was a template or something, and your thousands of lines of code is gone because the original template repo removed you as a contributor. If I copy something, I expect where I copied it from to have exactly zero bearing on what happens to my copy. If they have a problem they can serve legal documents, giving everyone time to figure…

I agree completely.

But at the same time - who doesn't have local copies of anything they care about? What are they thinking!?

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