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by danielvaughn 979 days ago
I was doing this, and sent a question to Github support for a particular thing I was trying to do with my multiple accounts. I got a fairly strong warning about how I was in violation of their service agreement and I could get my subscription terminated if I was found to be using multiple accounts.

It was very odd. Either (a) the person responding to me was uninformed, or (b) that's actually Github's policy and it's not nearly as prominently displayed as it should be.
2 comments
jomar 979 days ago
It's always been very clear in their Terms of Service (which obviously everyone reads carefully...):

The third bullet point at https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t... --

> One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).

This is the primary reason why I have only ever used my own personal account for work stored at GitHub. If a company is expecting its employees to use a separate work GH account, one assumes that company is planning to pay for all those accounts for its employees.

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jomar 979 days ago
Having said that, given that many people do use separate GitHub accounts for their separate private and work personas, and many organisations seemingly expect their employees to do so, perhaps GitHub could consider revising this Terms of Service restriction to better reflect reality.

There have also been times when I would like to have access to a second GitHub account for testing purposes. (In particular, for testing GH behaviour when the accounts corresponding to PR commits, PR creator, and PR merger all differ -- see for example <https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1368>.)

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natebc 979 days ago
I maintain two but my personal account is a Pro account.

I imagine some large number of folks that have two accounts are Pro on at at least one of them, if not both.

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mathstuf 979 days ago
It's not allowed:

> One person or legal entity may maintain no more than one free Account (if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine).

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

I suppose you could pay for additional accounts though.

Anyways, I would use SSH host aliases for this myself as well. Might want to consider `IdentitiesOnly yes` as well.

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smaudet 979 days ago
In context of parent post, I wonder if people realize github is not where git things come from...

"if you choose to control a machine account as well, that's fine, but it can only be used for running a machine"

I'm not aware that "running a machine" has a legal definition. I think it's fine, if you have a corporate account and a private email you are probably fine. I think they mainly have that as some sort of rate limiting legalese, to prevent abuse from "account hopping" i.e. abusing the github api or spamming, etc..

If your work account is a "legal entity", i.e. it is a person under corporate personhood laws, this definition also doesn't really hold water (both you and the corporation account count as legal persons, so this doesn't do much, other than the cost of an incorporation being non-zero). Just don't do weird things with your separate accounts, and actually keep them separate, and you're probably fine.

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