In the philosophical sense, sure. But given the context of this conversation, the fact that you don’t have to pay to use GitHub projects is absolutely relevant to their success.
I agree with you on that, sure. I think being gratis overlaps with being free… I think?… Having free access to the software means being able to use it and distribute it. I guess profit comes most of the times from support or distribution of the software, or the binaries. I have read this post [1] on the topic referenced in the Wikipedia article I mentioned, I thought it was interesting.
[1] https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2016-...