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Comment by ch4s3 | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike the trend of locking people out of professional work and banking due to bad or disagreeable speech. I really don't see a world in which this doesn't lead to some sort of backlash that we're all going to wish hadn't happened.

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The real problem is companies that expect employees to use free consumer-grade services for their work and are therefore held to those SLAs. Github has an enterprise plan where an employer can use their own SSO and doesn't have to rely on you setting up a personal account. Why not use that instead? Right, because they have to then pay for it.

If you are using a service for work, you should not be expected to maintain a direct relationship with them. It's on your employer to negotiate account creation, terms of use, payment, banning or whatever else. This is exactly how something like, say, Slack works.

I think part of the problem here is that github is banning all accounts he has access to. So even if he has a work and private account, both could still be banned. We dont know if they would escalate to a paid githut corporate account or not, but it is not inconceivable.

Github is banning all their personal accounts. Enterprise ones are governed by completely separate agreements. They probably won't even be able to identify you in that case considering you aren't the one creating the account, your IT admin is.

note that not all enterprise setups use enterprise managed accounts.

you can also use GHE with unmanaged accounts that are still connected via SSO for approving access.

using enterprise managed accounts and unmanaged accounts on the same system can be quite annoying because you'll need to use different browser contexts (container tabs, separate browsers, etc.) and also different hostnames for ssh cloning to use different ssh keys.

https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/admin/ide...

We need to normalize strict separation between our social and work life.

Yeah github is a funny one - I use my personal github for work, and I know many people who do. Whereas if your work uses g-suite or outlook/O365, it's not like you just use your personal google or hotmail (or whatever ms has now) account with it. Separate, and centrally managed would be better, I don't know how we got here

To be fair, Github actually considers it a best practice to only have one account, but I think they really want to keep it all about the social graph.

Long ago I tried to split mine and the problem I ran into was messiness with ssh key management and I actually asked GitHub to merge them back into one. It was obvious it was a pain in the ass.

(That was 12 years ago I haven't checked if https/oauth made things better)

It's actually not too bad even with SSH. I set up host aliases (https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/kinetic/en/man5/ssh_con...) that use different keys so I can just do "git clone work:realname/project" or "git clone personal:renata/sideproject".

The "backlash" is that people who care will migrate to other Git hosting providers, of which there are several, at least two of which are HN darlings.

Particularly on the banking front, I wouldn't be so sure that this trends only results in people moving to say GitLab.

Read China and Taiwan history to find how such policies end.

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