Clarify billing-scope difference between members and collaborators on org-owned codespaces

[arthurattwell]

Code of Conduct

• [x] I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

Choosing who owns and pays for codespaces in your organization

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

The documentation for “Choosing who owns and pays for Codespaces in your organization” is misleading about how Codespaces ownership applies to forks.

It states that “a codespace is organization-owned if it’s created from one of the organization’s repositories, or from a fork of one of the organization’s repositories.”

In practice, this only applies when the user creating the Codespace is an organization member. Outside collaborators cannot create organization-owned Codespaces from forks in their personal namespaces, even if the fork originates from an organization repository and Codespaces are enabled for them.

This distinction between members and outside collaborators should be made explicit to prevent confusion and wasted time for teams trying to configure Codespaces access and billing correctly.

This distinction should also be carried through to the wording on the relevant settings page at https://github.com/organizations/[ORGANIZATION]/settings/codespaces.

Additional information

Example: The user Michelle-BlueLeaf has a fork of electricbookworks/core-the-economy-2. She is an outside collaborator on this private repo. When she tries to create a codespace, GitHub is applying her individual account's settings, not creating the codespace in electricbookworks, where we have enabled codespaces for all members and collaborators, and set all codespaces to be org-owned.

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[Sharra-writes]

@arthurattwell Thanks for opening an issue! That does seem like an important distinction, so I'll take it to the team and make sure it's all working as intended.

[bunne5464-hash]

Code of Conduct

• [x] I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

Choosing who owns and pays for codespaces in your organization

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

The documentation for “Choosing who owns and pays for Codespaces in your organization” is misleading about how Codespaces ownership applies to forks.

It states that “a codespace is organization-owned if it’s created from one of the organization’s repositories, or from a fork of one of the organization’s repositories.”

In practice, this only applies when the user creating the Codespace is an organization member. Outside collaborators cannot create organization-owned Codespaces from forks in their personal namespaces, even if the fork originates from an organization repository and Codespaces are enabled for them.

This distinction between members and outside collaborators should be made explicit to prevent confusion and wasted time for teams trying to configure Codespaces access and billing correctly.

This distinction should also be carried through to the wording on the relevant settings page at https://github.com/organizations/[ORGANIZATION]/settings/codespaces.

Additional information

Example: The user Michelle-BlueLeaf has a fork of electricbookworks/core-the-economy-2. She is an outside collaborator on this private repo. When she tries to create a codespace, GitHub is applying her individual account's settings, not creating the codespace in electricbookworks, where we have enabled codespaces for all members and collaborators, and set all codespaces to be org-owned.

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