Terms of Service

Terms of Service (June 21, 2025)

Welcome to the Game of Trees Hub.

By storing Git repository content here, you accept the following conditions:

What we provide

We provide Git repository hosting services under certain terms and conditions. These services are referred to as "service", "hosting" and "platform" in this document.

The hosting service is based on the Game of Trees version control system and OpenBSD. Our server aims to be compatible with any Git client implementation, not just the Game of Trees client called got.

"We" are a community of volunteers who contribute to the Game of Trees project and run the Game of Trees Hub. The legal entity formally providing the service is the company Chirpy Software SRL in 1040 Brussels, Belgium.

Our service is open to anyone who accepts our terms of service, and is intended to be used for software development activities.

Our service is funded by its users, and we want our users to know how the money they contribute is used by us. All financial transactions related to the service are published on a public ledger on our Open Collective page.

Third party terms

Because we use Open Collective and Stripe, use of our service may require accepting the Open Collective Terms of Service and the Stripe Privacy Policy.

Usage

In order to use the service, Git repository space can be booked. Each repository space is hosted on a dedicated subdomain of the gothub.org domain. Depending on the use case, a given repository space may host an individual's Git repositories, or all repositories belonging to one or more software projects or organizations.

Owners of Git repository space choose a service tier which fits their use case, and must pay a recurring fee to keep using the associated hosting resources. Within the limits of the repository space, an arbitrary amount of Git repositories and additional user accounts can be created by editing the gotsys.conf file in the repository space's gotsys.git repository.

Users of the service who were given access to someone else's Git repository space are encouraged, but not required, to make voluntary financial contributions on our Open Collective page in order to support the development of Game of Trees.

Uploaded Content

Your content belongs to you and we do not claim any rights to it. We will not use your content for any purpose other than providing the service to you and anyone else who has been granted access to your Git repositories.

Even though we try our best to prevent it, content you upload to public repositories might be downloaded by third parties who are scraping the world wide web or are mass-cloning public repositories via anonymous SSH. For this reason, public repositories should only be used for public content. Private content belongs in private repositories, which can only be accessed by authenticated users.

We make no specific demands regarding the licensing of software and related assets uploaded to the platform. Free software, open source software, proprietary software, freely licensed assets, and proprietary assets can be uploaded.

The following content is not allowed in public repositories, but is allowed in private repositories:

• Advertisements for commercial products or services.
• Personally identifiable information (personal phone number, personal address, etc.), and only if explicitly provided voluntarily by the affected individual for upload to this service.

Below, we list content which is explicitly forbidden from appearing anywhere on the platform.

You must not upload data which can be abused for identify theft, such as social security numbers, photos of ID cards or other travel documents, personal bank account or credit card numbers and related secrets such as PIN numbers, etc.

You must not upload data which allows profiling of people for any purpose, including purposes such as targeted advertising.

You must not upload malware, unless your use of it is legal in your jurisdiction, and it is used for purposes of defensive security research or education, and is clearly labeled as malware with appropriate warnings, and has been defused with appropriate safeguards to avoid accidental infection of any computer system.

You must not upload content that may result in criminal or civil liability under any applicable laws. This includes, but is not limited to, copyright and patent infringements, and age-restricted content without age confirmation, and content which is illegal in countries our servers are located in (as of 2025, this includes Germany and Belgium). The legislations of countries we host in as well as the legislation of your country of residence may be relevant here.

We explicitly do not tolerate the following, regardless of whether such content is considered legal in your own jurisdiction:

• Content discriminatory towards others or promoting oppression, especially of marginalized groups on grounds of: ethnicity, gender identity and expression, sexual identity and orientation, age or physical characteristics, disability or illness, immigrant or refugee status, health, financial status, educational status, nationality, residency or citizenship status, religion and faith or lack thereof.
• Violent nationalist propaganda, Nazi symbolism or promoting the ideology of fascism, National Socialism, white supremacy or other extremist, violent or xenophobic viewpoints.
• Mobbing, stalking, doxxing (exposing someone's personal information), brigading (inciting a group to spam a specific place for any reason), threatening and harassment, as well as encouraging others to do so.
• Insults, discriminatory jokes, sexualized comments and other unwanted sexual attention to others.
• Sexually obscene content, including content involving the exploitation or sexualization of minors.

Your Responsibilities

You are responsible for your own actions. Act accordingly and apply appropriate security measures to protect your own data and account access credentials. Exercise caution and do not upload disallowed content.

You are expected to read the Game of Trees documentation. In particular, repository space owners must read the documentation of gotsys.conf and the (optional) gotsys utility in order to be able to make use of the service.

Users who have access to the gotsys.git repository of a repository space are expected to use the permit directive in gotsys.conf responsibly, in order to avoid leaking proprietary source code (where required) or other private content. Mixing public and private content in the same repository is unsafe because access permissions are set on a per-repository basis.

The Git repository format is suited well for small text files but does not lend itself well to hosting large files. Too many large files will cause service disruption in the affected Git repository space. Keep this in mind when adding new files to your repositories. Consider hosting large files elsewhere.

You are responsible for making regular backups of everything you rely on. We may not always immediately have the most recent version of your repositories in backup storage.

Sensitive secrets, such as passwords or other credentials, should be encrypted by you before data is uploaded. Otherwise, such secrets may eventually leak. Consider using tools such as plass to securely store sensitive credentials in Git repositories.

If you observe terms of service violations on the platform, please report them to abuse@.

Guarantees

We honour the GDPR Regulation (EU) 2016/679. See our privacy policy for details.

If your service tier includes backups, we will make regular backups of your Git repositories on the platform, unless you choose to opt-out via email to admins@.

We make no guarantees about the online availability of the content hosted on our platform. Although we try to keep content available online, service maintenance and server outages can occur. If possible we will provide notification about outages ahead of time.

Cancellation and Termination

You can stop using the service at any time.

Users who do not own a repository space directly can simply stop making use of the resources provided and ask the owner of the repository space to delete their access credentials.

Owners of Git repository space can stop sending recurring payments. Once we detect that a payment has lapsed, all associated Git repositories will become read-only and we will send a notification to the owner. In case the payment has lapsed accidentally, repositories will now remain in read-only state for 4 weeks, and can be made writable again by sending another payment. After 4 weeks, data in the repository space will be deleted to make room for new users.

Content which violates our terms of service will be removed by us as soon as we become aware of it.

Any confirmed terms of service violation will result in repositories becoming read-only immediately, and removal of the Git repository space within 4 weeks if the terms of service violation is not addressed by the owner. We will not refund any already received payments in such cases.

Reselling or leasing our service elsewhere as part of a commercial product or service is not allowed, and will lead to termination of service and deletion of your data immediately. (Privately sharing the costs of a Git hosting space between friends is fine.)

Disclaimer of Warranties and Liability

The services on our platform are provided on an 'as is' basis. We make no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaim and negate all other warranties including, without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights.

Further, we do not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on our website or otherwise relating to such materials or on any sites linked to this site.

In no event shall we or Chirpy Software SRL or its suppliers be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption) arising out of the use or inability to use the materials on the platform, even if one of us or an authorized representative has been notified orally or in writing of the possibility of such damage. Because some jurisdictions do not allow limitations on implied warranties, or limitations of liability for consequential or incidental damages, these limitations may not apply to you.

Sources & License of this text

Our terms of service were based in part on the bsd.network terms with permission. And in part based on codeberg.org terms, which in turn were based on the chaos.social terms, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, as well as by the JetBrains Open Source and Community Code of Conduct, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

This text is free to be adapted and remixed under the CC-BY-SA (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) license.