Let's assume for a moment that email is true: how many businesses have policies that allow their staff to use language in that particular way?
And Github, like most other providers, have catch-all clauses in the ToS. This one, perhaps:
> We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.
I suppose my point is that if you're a business you shouldn't rely on Github etc.
I 100% believe GitHub has the right to police and enforce their own standards on their system - just wanted to make that clear first. This is not about the r-word issue for me.
What I find unsettling is that what they could consider "objectionable" is wide open and resolution of raised issues is expected so rapidly. Silly story time..
A developer in MajorCorp leaves a code comment (which is eventually committed) saying "// TODO: Fix this later, GitHub is down again, GitHub is trash!". GitHub could fairly request its removal as it is likely to be objectionable to them.
However, the main contact on the account is away at a conference and gets to their email a couple of days later. Is their repo or even their entire account now toast? How much would someone want to bet against that?
This is a farfetched contrived story, but now there's a demonstrated (again, assuming the screenshot is legit) attempt to enforce this clause and evidence of "24 hours" being the timeframe allowed for resolution, the tiny risk of such an outcome is going to hit sentiment and get legal departments twitching.
(My personal suspicion is paying and enterprise users will not receive such threats, but in the above example I'm being idealistic and assuming everyone gets equal treatment.)
Most cloud services can be pulled from your business at any time for any reason. This includes gmail and Facebook, and also payment processors.
(Personally I can't understand hosting your source code offsite in the first place if you're a business and not an open source project, but it seems to be popular)
And Github, like most other providers, have catch-all clauses in the ToS. This one, perhaps:
> We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.
I suppose my point is that if you're a business you shouldn't rely on Github etc.