[sltr]

Palmer's tweet said a similar thing and added, "we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year".

$184M in profit or cost?

It's called a loss leader, not a gift, and it's a marketing and adoption tactic. They already bought the machines which cost about as much to run idle as at 100% utilization. Might as well put that idle capex and opex to use.

Or just collectively bill OSS the $184M and stop signaling virtue.

[otterley]

We don’t know whether GitHub has idle capacity to spare. If they’re auto scaling their resources like a well-architected workload should, then they probably don’t. Even if they’re not downscaling their compute, they may prefer to run other low-priority jobs on it.