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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

It's very "sharing economy": someone else has a resource you can use for free, so why not take it?

(Edit: </rhetorical> </sarcasm>)

Because abusing that resource makes sure you (or anyone else) won't be able to take it in the future. I thought that's pretty obvious?

This may very well be the first time that Cocoa Pods was told that they're consuming a huge amount of resources. They might not have even known that what they're doing is considered abuse.

hard for me to believe no one was ever curious enough to do the math

People are starting to get used to the idea that you hit someones api and they scale for you. I mean from a company based on scaling that's strange but there's a lot of 'magic' that goes into a lot of providers being able to always respond to an API call and most don't see it.

Based on just looking at how some of my employer's customers use our service, plenty of them are completely clueless that they're well outside of normal usage patterns.

I think the parent was expressing the project owners' thought, "we could do this, why not," and not saying they agreed with it.

pjc50's question was rhetorical, and was offering a critique of the "sharing economy" mindset. That it should be pretty obvious is exactly the point.

OT (from primary discussion): This isn't the sharing economy. This is someone abusing a resource.

You're assuming that people are willing to defer gratification today in order to ensure long-term sustainability. To illustrate why this might be a problematic assumption, I would point to all of human history.

I take your use of "sharing economy </r></s>" as post-uber/airbnb/etc, instead of, as I first heard it, from couchsurfing, potlucks, bittorrent, etc well before that.

Also while nit-picking, I would clear up your use of "for free </r></s>" as "as a freebie", again post-[insert: x̄ȳz, inc].

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