github-terms-of-service: Define "Other Users" #57
Conversation
The ToS require You to provide them with legal rights in section D.5. By defining a term, we have lots of space to remove any ambiguity about what that means. For example, it clearly covers visitors regardless of whether they have a GitHub account. I've replaced most instances of "users" with the new term, leaving out only those which referred to all users (You and Other Users). We don't formally define that "Users", but one new term seemed sufficient for this commit ;). In lines I touch, I've also title-cased other terms (e.g. "you" -> "You). If we have a formally-defined term available, I don't see why we would prefer the generic term to the formal term.
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Hey, We'll take a look at the definition of "Other Users" — thanks for the suggestion. We left "you" and "we" lower-case on purpose. We worked very hard to create a clear, human-readable, user-friendly agreement using conversational language and sentence structure. Where possible, we tried to avoid legalese like convoluted clauses, archaic jargon, and stuffy specialized language. We believe that over-use of capital letters where they aren't necessary for clarity doesn't make the agreement easier to read or understand. In this case, "You" and "We" are defined terms, and even if we leave them lower case, the person reading the agreement understands that "You" means the person who's agreeing to the agreement and "We" means GitHub. We're able to have an easy-to-read agreement without worrying about ambiguity. I'm going to close this for now, but we're having an internal discussion about "Other Users" and how that may affect other parts of the agreement. Thanks! |
Has anything come out of this discussion yet? I'm not sure what to do with #54 (e.g. I'd want to remove "Other Users" there if you decide against it here). |
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Thanks for the reminder — we've decided not to specify "Other Users" as a defined term. It's only used in the license grant, and we don't believe it's unclear enough to need a separate definition. |
The ToS require You to provide them with legal rights in section D.5. By defining a term, we have lots of space to remove any ambiguity about what that means. For example, it clearly covers visitors regardless of whether they have a GitHub account.
I've replaced most instances of “users” with the new term, leaving out only those which referred to all users (You and Other Users). We don't formally define that “Users”, but one new term seemed sufficient for this commit ;).
In lines I touch, I've also title-cased other terms (e.g. “you” → “You”). If we have a formally-defined term available, I don't see why we would prefer the generic term to the formal term. I expect the previous lowercase forms were accidental, but if any were intentional let me know and I'll revert those changes.
This pull request is against #1, but I can rebase it against master if that's more convenient.
Spun off from #54 at @mirabilos' request.