[TOS] GitHub adds educational accounts

Nicholas Whittier nwhittier at gmail.com
Thu Feb 24 19:15:59 UTC 2011


Mel - thanks for doing the brunt of the work for me on this, these are
important supplemental data points.  I added a few comments inline.


> * 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).
>
>
Your concerns about licensing might preclude this point/concern, but I was
thinking that the private repositories could be exactly the difference that
allow some institutions to use github.  It seems that IP regulations in
academia may prefer (read: "require") private repos as compared to the
necessarily public repositories that accommodate the free accounts provided
to open source projects.


> * 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.
>
>
Great points regarding github, gitorious, and FOSS status.  My only addition
here is that there are a lot of open source projects using github, as well
as a lot of open source-friendly organizations who use github for their VCS.
 In light of these facts (I'm using 'facts' - although I don't have a source
to cite), if we are trying to promote open source participation, and
effectively teach people how to get started/involved, I think being able to
offer hands-on github experience will be a great addition.

-- Nicholas
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