No. Of course not. Seems like the easiest decision they made all week.

Imagine it was your software. And that somebody had pirated your beta and actually posted instructions on how to do so on the forums of your own website. What would you do?

Naturally, you'd delete the comment the second you saw it, then start working on patching the hole.

Which is what they did.

Can you articulate why?

Their terms of service aren't exactly a grand stand for freedom of expression:

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.

From:

https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service

Well, I suppose I can try.

While I understand that Github is a private body and that their site is, well, their site ... forcibly deleting someone's gist simply because they don't like that that someone has found a way around their invite process smacks of underhandedness.

Will they suspend his account permanently as a result of this leak? Will he have his account limited in some other way, preventing him from having private repos, for example? Will they lash out against anyone sharing Atom.zip that they can trace back to a github account?

It's just all very "our show, our rules" of them to delete the gist.

And yes, I understand that it is their show. And yes, their ruleset too.

Doesn't make me feel any comfier in the knowledge that they'll simply delete anything that they don't approve of.

Imagine someone posting the url to access your commercial product because your dev didn't secure the download. And you have control over the post. What would you do then? And Github can delete anything they want. If anyone has problem with that, they sure can sue Github.

Like I said - I get that.

Also, like I said - it seems underhanded that they just reach into an account and delete gists

If it is the case that they removed it, I would prefer "Github has removed this content" to "Oh, hey, we can't find that".

Well, is there any sort of content that you would not fault them for removing?

Imo its perfectly reasonable to not want your new product leak out before official release for numerous reasons, like it not being finished/ready for example.

And for the reasons they give in their FAQ:

This beta invite program is designed to let us carefully control how many new people get access to Atom each day so we can provide timely bug fixes and support responses.

isn't that the same message if the user took it down? I.e. how do you know GitHub took it down themselves? btw, I also feel it's pretty wrong to exploit a workaround like this to obtain the software against the authors' wishes.

True, there's no proof that they did it.

I'd still put money on them having done it.