Those icons are Font Awesome 4.7, which is completely open source so you can do almost whatever you want with them.

Font Awesome 5 will have a Free and Pro version. The Free version will be completely open source and you can use it however you like. The Pro version will have 2500-ish more icons and an SVG framework. Pro is the only one to worry about for distribution. :)

Is it accurate that if you're using Font Awesome 5 Pro in an open source project you can't include the icons in the repository?

Correct. It's not okay to distribute commercial software to folks who have not paid. But Font Awesome Free is completely okay to include in the repo, as it is open source software.

That said, we're letting open source projects use Font Awesome Pro CDN for free so this is hopefully mitigated. We want folks to use Font Awesome Pro, just don't want it distributed. :)

This is great news; when I emailed you guys, you said "For open source projects, we’re working something out" but I didn't know what.

I backed Font Awesome Pro but I was afraid I'd only ever be able to use the Free version since all my projects are open-source.

My only concern left is for offline apps (like NW.js apps). I can make do with Font Awesome Free's icon set, but it'd be nice to have those SVG icons...

That definitely makes sense :)

And the CDN at least helps mitigate any deployment issues with not being able to keep the images in the repo.

Isn't the whole point of a CDN to distribute things?

Distribution is the means; the end is to load assets faster.

Can you email me? niftylettuce@gmail.com <3333 keep up the kick ass work. I'm launching a crowdfunding campaign of my own thanks to your inspiration.

Done!