[TOS] GitHub adds educational accounts

Mel Chua mel at redhat.com
Thu Feb 24 14:58:44 UTC 2011


> GitHub now has educational accounts (free for students, free for
> teachers/student groups, discount for educational administrators).

Ooh! Thanks for the heads-up. A few notes for those looking into infra - 
not so much an opinion or action recommendation as "useful quick things 
I looked up so you don't have to":

* open source projects can get public repositories for free on github 
already; the advantage of these edu accounts is that they let you create 
private repositories (you'd usually have to pay for an account with this 
functionality).

* github itself isn't FOSS - this will matter to some people here, 
myself included - but I think I'd personally be under "strong 
preference" rather than "hard requirement" here. (If the non-FOSS 
product is better, I would be fine with using it and then sending the 
best FOSS competitor a note saying "hey, here are the things that are 
keeping us from using you," maybe helping them with budget for a 
hackathon to implement some stuff on the list, and re-evaluating in a 
year or so.)

* Its competitor gitorious is FOSS - there are some feature tradeoffs 
between the two; gitorious has nice merge request functionality etc, but 
private repos seems easier on github (I'm unclear whether it exists in 
gitorious - I think "no" but found some patches for it under review for 
merging - we could ask the devs) and I know that's important for this group.

* Either way, I'm going to need a scratch-test git repository (public is 
ok) for the POSSE remote module on version control, and would like to be 
able to use some pretty public web service for it... and I'll need it 
before the start of August. Which I suspect may coincide with the 
timeline for when professors here would need theirs. My fallback here is 
"use gitorious/github's public repo feature."

--Mel



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