policies

le, nor clarify how that license could be revoked by the content owner. > When Your Content is removed from the Website or the Public Registry, whether by you or npm, npm's special license ends when the last copy disappears from npm's backups, caches, and other systems. This seems deceitful. What exactly does "when the last copy disappears" mean? Seems to me that "perpetual backups" would effectively make their "special license" perpetual. Speaking of "special license", they really need to have an attorney write this up. > Other licenses, such as open source licenses, may continue after Your Content is removed. Those licenses may give others, or npm itself, the right to share Your Content with npm Services again. Fair enough, and implies that if my license doesn't give them that right, that unpublishing the code should revoke their "special license". > Either you or npm may terminate this Agreement at any time with notice to the other...The following provisions survive termination of this Agreement: "Your Content", "Feedback", "Indemnity", "Disclaimers", "Limits on Liability", and "General Terms" So ... I can terminate the agreement, but that doesn't actually terminate anything? Don't get me wrong, I feel that npm serves an important function in the community, but as this drama continues to unfold, I find myself trusting them less and less. [0]: https://github.com/npm/policies/commit/140ed66e2169e248674fe...

o me 3 times in last few months, the latest being less than a week after the left-pad incident [1]. 1. https://github.com/chalk/ansi-styles/issues/15 2. GitHub issue with additional discussion here: https://github.com/npm/policies/issues/44

nice comparison of this workflow to "GitHub flow": http://zachholman.com/posts/git-commit-history/ . See also git-send-email and git-format-patch.) A developer might be tempted to squash commits to make a "pretty" patch. In an adversarial negotiation, hiding incremental revision history is essential for maintaining confidentiality and information advantage. If you're going to squash, anonymize, remove timestamps, &c. every time, Git is overhead and potentially dangerous. Git's architecture does not allow parallel, private histories for shared commits; you can't have your secrets and share them, too. Fortunately, there are two common situations where Git makes sense for legal docs: standard forms and public terms. GitHub is in active use in both those areas. A few pioneers, among them Jason Boehmig, whose Ironclad is a recent YC alum, and Casey Kuhlman, now of Eris Industries, have done work on "open" form contracts in plaintext markup tracked with Git. Jason lead the effort to make the Series Seed financing documents available on GitHub: https://github.com/seriesseed/equity I've followed in Jason's footsteps with an in-development community revision of Series Seed at https://github.com/seriesnext/seriesnext and an experimental company-to-company NDA at https://github.com/obviousnda/obviousnda (More announcements in this vein to come.) Casey's "Legal Markdown" and later writing for Eris were big inspiration for my current open-source work. Public terms, like terms of use, fall somewhere in between working on a standard form for the common good and negotiating a contentious agreement. On the one hand, what's good for the service provider may come at user expense, as with arbitration clauses or limits on liability. On the other hand, courts require that users at least have notice and a way to review changes made, and transparency goes a long way to earning user trust and avoiding PR blow-up. When the users on the other side are devs, Git makes a lot of sense. A number of developer-tools companies use version control to track their privacy policies, and sometimes other company policies. npm, Inc.'s policies, to give one example, are here: https://github.com/npm/policies Many of these use GitHub's "prose diff" support for Markdown. If you're interested in terms of use, privacy policies, and the like, I've written about how my open-source work on "Common Form" (https://commonform.github.io), a schema and content-addressing system for modular legal documents, will apply to those terms: http://writing.kemitchell.com/2015/08/24/TOS-Already-Read.ht...