Just to clarify, GitHub hosts a very specific type of content: open source software development projects. They never offered to be a general purpose hosting provider.

From @mhagger's measured and thoughtful reply: "We understand that part of the CocoaPods workflow is that its end users (i.e., not just the people contributing to CocoaPods/Specs) fetch regularly from GitHub..."

That's true that anyone with a repo is essentially a customer, paying or not. But CocoaPods is really a bad actor in this in that they're not just hosting source code up their for development purposes. They're using it like a CDN, and bless Github for not find a reason to boot them, but I'm sure they've got a bunch of legal ways to do it in their terms of service. I'd argue that CocoaPods is really breaking the spirit of what GH is trying to provide.

This is getting granular, but any GitHub user - whether free or paid - is bound by the Terms of Service. Yes, that makes them a customer, and they accordingly have to adhere to the conditions of using the product.

The one that CP's usage most likely confronts is G.12 - found here: (https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service/)

> If your bandwidth usage significantly exceeds the average bandwidth usage (as determined solely by GitHub) of other GitHub customers, we reserve the right to immediately disable your account or throttle your file hosting until you can reduce your bandwidth consumption.