Comment by nkmnz
5 hours ago
I'm contradicting your interpretation of the Wikipedia article. It does not support your initial statement that a) Github's (or any other company's) free tier constitutes a commons and/or b) the "overuse" of said free tiers by free riders could be the base of a tragedy of the commons (ToC). The idea is absurd, since there is no commons and also no tragedy. To the contrary. Commons have an external or natural limit to how much they can provide in a given time without incurring cost in the form of depreciation. But there is no external or natural limit to the free tier. The free tier is the result of the incentives under which the Github management operates and it is fully at their discretion, so the limits are purely internal. Other than in the case of commons, more usage can actually increase the amount of resources provided by the company for the users of the free tier, because a) network effects and b) economies of scale (more users bring more other users; more users cost less per user).
If Github realizes that the free tier is too generous, they can cut it anytime without it being in any way a "tragedy" for anybody involved - having to pay for stuff or service you want to consume is not the "T" in ToC! The T is that there are no incentives to pay (or use less) without increasing the incentives for everyone else to just increase their relative use! You not using the github free tier doesn't increase the usage of Github for anybody else - if it has any effect at all, it might actually decrease the usage of Github because you might not publish something that might in turn attract other users to interact.
Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization, as an example of a digital commons.
The ‘tragedy’ that the top comment referred to is losing unlimited access to some of GitHub’s features, as described in the article (shallow clones, CPU limits, API rate limits, etc.). The finiteness, or natural limit, does exist in the form of bandwidth, storage capacity, server CPU capacity, etc.. The Wikipedia article goes through that, so I’m left with the impression you didn’t understand it.
> Wikipedia does use Wikipedia, a privately owned organization
The Wikimedia organization does not actually own wikipedia. They do not control editorial policy nor own the copyright of any of the contents. They do not pay any of the editors.
They do own the servers. The rest of your comment is what demonstrates why Wikipedia counts as “commons”. Much of the same can be said for GitHub too.