Did you see https://github.com/crocodilejs/font-awesome-assets? Not sure if we are OK to have the icons there - the licensing is confusing - we're not really distributing 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. :)
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. :)
And the CDN at least helps mitigate any deployment issues with not being able to keep the images in the repo.
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...