[mabbo]

The author used up so much of github's resources that it impacted other users. 22 million commits is probably enough that something started to hit a linear or n-log-n scaling function, setting off an alarm on some metric. Yeah, you get in trouble for that.

I'm reminded of a time in high school where my friend almost got himself banned from the school computers.

At home he had dial-up internet (it was 2003 and he lived in a very rural area). But at school he had megabits of bandwidth he could (ab)use. So he started pirating everything on the internet using a computer nobody ever used in a side-room of the library. It ran 24/7 downloading his long list of desires: games, movies, tv series, etc. He stored his spoils on his network drive, which had no limits on how much it could hold (until he got caught). He'd occasionally bring in a hard drive, copy everything that fit on it and bring it home with him on the school bus.

But all good things must end.

The network admin for the school board eventually came by and sat him down. He showed my friend a pie chart where, as he described it to me, "my name was on the portion that took up more than 2/3 of the pie". After a conversation, all the data got deleted, my friend got a stern warning, and somehow didn't get into any worse trouble than that.

[Panzer04]

"somehow"

I don't get this attitude. Shit happens, we talk about it, we don't do it again. Not everything needs to have dire consequences.

[flutas]

I think he means "somehow" in the meaning of "somehow, none of the copyright holders asked the school for his information."

[layer8]

> The author used up so much of github's resources that it impacted other users.

Note that the message only said “the potential to affect other users”. I would expect a professional service to catch such things before it actually affects other users.

[justinclift]

Sounds like the network admin and surrounding people had their heads screwed on properly. :)