On the flip side, user 'alloy' gives the response that their decision to use github as a CDN was an explicit decision. In designing a product to scale, they apparently explicitly decided to outsource the 'scaling' part. While it may have been surprising to them, I don't think it should have been so surprising.
> It strikes me as extremely unreasonable to expect a group to avoid abusing a free service when nobody tells them that it's abuse
I don't think so at all. An experienced developer should expect that a free service will rate-limit their offerings at some point, and design around that. Viewing 'free' as 'an eternal resource sponge that we never have to think about' is the extremely unreasonable thing to do, in my opinion. I think that 'abuse' is probably the wrong word to use here, since that implies malice, and they don't appear to be malicious.
> It strikes me as extremely unreasonable to expect a group to avoid abusing a free service when nobody tells them that it's abuse
I don't think so at all. An experienced developer should expect that a free service will rate-limit their offerings at some point, and design around that. Viewing 'free' as 'an eternal resource sponge that we never have to think about' is the extremely unreasonable thing to do, in my opinion. I think that 'abuse' is probably the wrong word to use here, since that implies malice, and they don't appear to be malicious.