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Comment by doiwin | Hacker News Reader

Eric, how is your service tied to GitHub? As far as I understand it, you simply are a matchmaker for developers and advertisers. And you track clicks to the advertisers urls. Where the developers put the links to those urls is not your decision, right?

If so, I don't think GitHub has an angle to attack you.

A developer with a Commission Junction account could very well put CJ links in their README. That would not give GitHub a vector to attack CJ.

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You mean, legal angle? Probably not, but Github can simply ban all links to Code Sponsor.

But why not get Github out of the equation? I know it might seem a lot to ask but there are alternatives, Github has their right to ban you but it don't need to be the end. Or am I missing something?

Author responded in another thread earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15774729

> 60% of all traffic through Code Sponsor came from Github. 15% came from ad blocked traffic (I have no idea the referer). About 15% came from websites and then the remainder came from different repository websites (dockerhub, npm, etc).

From the monetizable repo views, 86% of all views were from Github. Barring a massive cultural shift, Github has to be part of the equation.

Yes, we are a way for sponsors and developers to connect. We do not tell developers where in their code to place the banner. In hindsight, this may have been part of the problem. Perhaps we should have been more rigid in how we allow developers to present the banner.

TAForObjReasons is exactly right. Github has to be a part of the equation.

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