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Comment by sheogorath | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry to break it to you. But that's basically want you agreed to by accepting their terms of service:

"GitHub has the right to suspend or terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time."

https://docs.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-terms-o...

People, please read and question terms of online services.

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> A common moral flaw I see in individualist cultures is thinking that "they gave consent" is a good reason to intentionally do something harmful to someone.

https://twitter.com/technocrypto/status/1283038543577788417

Well, I would like to point out that the right move here would be to call out this clause in the terms of service. One could even try to take legal action in some countries that have civil right measures against such clauses.

But no, instead one runs around and starts a petition.

Yeah, go ahead and call out that clause. I bet that will do more than the petition.

He's not taking legal action, he's shedding light on a real dick move with a shitty response from support. He's also allowed to do that.

This is unhelpful. In a practical way, if you want to participate in open-source you very often must use GitHub. It is also unhelpful because it conflates what GitHub is legally allowed to do with what they should do. "They gave consent" is a poor basis for bad behavior and it cannot be normalized with a sniff and a "well, read the TOS".

Agreed, not super helpful his current situation. But might something that other people who read this want to take into consideration or being aware of. And hopefully being more critical about terms of service in future.

For him, I would expect to call out the clause that "allows" GitHub to do that as it is quite sure illegal in some European counties to have such a arbitrary termination policy. And maybe even start a legal case about it and call for support.

But this way it simply sounds like "please take me back" begging.

Your right to do something does not remove my right to complain about what you did publicly.

The clause is probably there to give GitHub some level of additional power to make judgements calls it may need to make, in situations that can't be anticipated.

It provides (or may provide) a stronger legal backing for GitHub if they have to terminate service for some reasonable reason that cannot be anticipated or enumerated in advance, in other words a judgement call, where the termination of service might be challenged legally or result in a lawsuit.

There are surely situations where action rather than pussy footing would be the right thing for GitHub to do, against a vexatious user with a penchant for abusing the service and using the legal system to incur costs on GitHub while doing so.

It would be much better if the clause was not so draconian. But I'm not sure what kinds of termination clause would protect GitHub in situations where it needs the flexibility to make judgement calls.

(ps. I don't want to imply the OP's GitHub account is in this category; I'm sure it isn't. I'm talking only about why the clause may be in the ToS.)

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. This atrocious quote ("with or without cause") is a great find; I personally have never bothered to read Github's terms of services before. If github literally says this in its terms of service — and it does — it's definitely worth knowing, and should give github users ample food for thought.

I think the downvotes are due to people interpreting the comment as a defense of github's behaviour in this situation rather than an attack on their POS TOS.

In other words.. he just got doctor disrespect'd

Nobody still knows what happened to him yet.

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