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Comment by slang800 | Hacker News Reader

Heroku is not "the commons", they're a company and people are playing within the rules that they set out.

This is definitely the "software engineer" way of conceptualizing and solving the problem. You have discrete limitations, you optimize around them.

This is clearly not "working at intended" though and I'd like to believe everyone knows that, including the people building this system.

This has to be the analog of "the first amendment only protects you from government restrictions on speech" in this conversation.

Heroku can protect itself from abuse of its free tier by changing the rules - which they eventually did.

I'm sure that the only reason why they kept the free tier as long as they did was because it brought in enough users (who were eventually converted into paying customers) to be worth the cost.

Of course it’s well within Heroku’s domain to structure their services however they choose. The tragedy is that if everyone uses the platform’s free tier to maximum utility in a self beneficial way, it exhausts the resources available and the common utility ceases to exist. So it’s not ethically wrong as was my response to the GGP. But it’s functionally “wrong” because it exhausts the common resource.

I think it's more of sadness that abuse took it away. It would be nice if hobbyists only used the free tiers and not successful businesses.

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