Are you saying that Gnome shouldn't offer access to their VCS for free, and all Gnome developers should pay a small sum to be able to access it?
FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.
Offering read-only mirrors via git+http:// might be a solution then, at least to shed the load if anything. It does remind me a bit about companies complaining about being scraped and trying to prevent it, instead of offering a API so no one would have to scrape them.
We do precisely this ... and we're still dealing with the load issues. Currently I have fail2ban doing a 10 day block on any IP addr that hits our read only http-git endpoint twice in 30 mins. The problem with this is that the default implementation of iptables doesn't scale well to 100k blocked addresses.
There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software. FOSS is more about having the ability to inspect and freely change your software to your use-cases.
> There is nothing that says you can't charge money for FOSS software
Well, yes and no. If you had a cost to access the source code, I'm pretty sure I'd stop calling that FOSS. If you only have a price for downloading binaries, sure, still FOSS, since we're talking source code licensing.
> Nothing should be $$ free
I took this statement at face value, and assumed parent argued for basically eliminating FOSS.
Actually I'm anti-capitalistic. That solution was supposed to undermine corporations who take other people's work for free. Maybe it shouldn't cover the whole FOSS, but I do think it fits OP's use case.
FOSS is generally built on the idea that anyone can use the code for anything, if you start to add a price for that, not only do you effectively gate your project from "poor people", but it also kind of erodes some of the core principles behind FOSS.