CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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CelineDion
CelineDion

Reputation: 1088

What happens when you set an organization's ownership to a business or an institution on GitHub?

I recently started a position at a new team. Their version control and programming best practices are non-existent. I'm trying to set up some infrastructure not only for myself and the one other computational researcher on my team, but also for future potential computational scientists who may join the team in the future.

To that end, I would like to create a GitHub organization to centralize all of our version-controlled code. However, one thing that is giving me pause is the wording of the organization creation page on GitHub:

GitHub Organization Creation Page

The "This Organization belongs to:" menu is a bit unclear to me.

If I specify my employer, what does that mean functionally about the use and control of the organization settings? There is no one else in my team who is interested in or even wants to be the "head" of this organization on GitHub, it's just me, but I do not want to "own" this organization; I want it to exist for others after I potentially leave. It's not mine; it's my employer's. I am creating this GitHub organization on my institute's behalf. If I type my employer's name, is that just a legal designation or will I be abdicating power over this GitHub to an account that doesn't even exist?

Upvotes: 29

Views: 3931

Answers (1)

juarez9j
juarez9j

Reputation: 353

There was a Github discussion about this topic.

If in the future you (Owner) leave repositories and no one takes them, the company or institution can legally initiate a formal request to Github to retrieve the repositories.

In addition, the account is under the Github Corporate Terms of Service, instead of the Standard Service terms, see:

You can start with an organization belonging to a personal account and later upgrade to the corporate terms.

Upvotes: 32

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