Policy

In 2022, governments and the policy community spent a lot of time thinking about open source. Here’s what that means and why it matters.

How GitHub advocated for developer interests at the US Copyright Office technical measures consultations

Read about how the GitHub Social Impact, Tech for Social Good and Policy teams participated in the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, including events we hosted with the World Health Organization and the UN Development Programme.

GitHub is sponsoring Open Source Initiative’s Deep Dive: AI because we think it’s important for the community to unpack how open source software, process, and principles can help best deliver on the promise of AI.

We’re excited that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has launched the 2022 edition of its Global Innovation Index (GII) with an indicator of developer creative outputs based on GitHub commits.

Access to the open internet is essential to defending human rights, and developers have an important role in promoting freedom of expression and transparency. GitHub is committed to keeping Iranians connected to the global developer community.

As the home for developers, we understand the key role our communities play in steering digital transformation and maintaining societal infrastructure. That’s why we choose to drive and support policies and initiatives like the Copenhagen Pledge on Tech for Democracy. We’re committed to working with like-minded organizations, governments, and civil society to make digital technologies work for democracy and human rights, and we encourage you to join us in this pledge.

We’re reporting on a six-month period rather than annually to increase our level of transparency. For this report, we’ve continued with the more granular reporting we began in our 2021 reports.

We share a recap of a recent roundtable event about what a federal open source software policy could look like in the United States.

In GitHub’s latest transparency report, we’re giving you a by-the-numbers look at how we responded to requests for user info and content removal.

As part of GitHub’s strong commitment to developer privacy, we are excited to announce updates to our privacy agreements in line with new legal requirements and our own robust data protection practices.

Ensuring that software copyright allegations are specific and actionable benefits the entire developer ecosystem. That’s why GitHub submitted a “friend of the court” brief in the SAS Institute, Inc. v. World Programming Ltd. case before a Federal Court of Appeals.

The GitHub Social Impact and Policy teams are issuing a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a researcher to define a list of publicly available GitHub platform usage metrics by country for international development, public policy and economics disciplines.

We’re reporting on a six-month period rather than annually to increase our level of transparency. For this report, we’ve added more granularity to our 2020 stats.

GitHub’s Developer Defense Fund will enable independent legal support from the Stanford Juelsgaard Clinic to review and handle appropriate DMCA cases for developers on GitHub and across the software ecosystem.