I guess you've never written an automated tool that works with remote repositories and sometimes has to force them. It's quite possible to accidentally force pu

I guess you've never written an automated tool that works with remote repositories and sometimes has to force them. It's quite possible to accidentally force push a branch that way – and that appears to be precisely what happened here. Sure, he maybe could have been more careful and avoided the mistake, but GitHub could incredibly easily allow people to configure repos so that this mistake can't be made. Your argument boils down to "don't make mistakes", whereas my point is that in this case it would be so easy for GitHub to give repo admins the ability to prevent this entire class of mistakes. [Note that using an explicit branch name, as has been suggested here, doesn't really help since you can easily accidentally force push a branch that way too.] The fact that your company has a draconian blanket policy is unfortunate, but has no bearing on whether or not people should be allowed to opt in to setting denyNonFastForwards on specific branches.