Say I have a project on Github, and I want to add some of the new icons I buy - I have to leave the icons out of the repo, and deal with whatever that means for deployment?
As for a public repo, the same applies as to commercial typography. Don't make it available for download.
This is part of why we're doing Font Awesome Pro CDN. Choose your options and icon packs and we'll serve them up for you. And we're making this free for open source projects. It also means you can upgrade to a new version without pushing code if you like.
Edit: what about an open source non-electron web application? How would they use the font?
So I could commit, say, an HTML file that linked your CDN; I couldn't commit the actual file on the CDN and link it relatively if I wanted to host it myself for some reason?
What about if the repos private, and instead of using your CDN, I serve it from my own `/assets` or whatever, does that count as making it "available for download" and therefore not allowed?
Serving static files on the web and making files available for download seems a pretty tenuous distinction.