> so I say take as much as you can. Commons would be if it’s owned by nobody

This isn’t what “commons” means in the term ‘tragedy of the commons’, and the obvious end result of your suggestion to take as much as you can is to cause the loss of access.

Anything that is free to use is a commons, regardless of ownership, and when some people use too much, everyone loses access.

Finite digital resources like bandwidth and database sizes within companies are even listed as examples in the Wikipedia article on Tragedy of the Commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

Still, because reality doesn't respect boundaries of human-made categories, and because people never define their categories exhaustively, we can safely assume that something almost-but-not-quite like a commons, is subject to an almost-but-not-quite tragedy of the commons.

It has the same effect though. A few bad actors using this “free” thing can end up driving the cost up enough that Microsoft will have to start charging for it.

The jerks get their free things for a while, then it goes away for everyone.

A public park suffers from tragedy of the commons even though it’s managed by the city.

Right. Microsoft could easily impose a transfer fee if over a certain amount that would allow “normal” OSS development of even popular software to happen without charge while imposing a cost to projects that try to use GitHub like a database.

Well, till you choose to host something yourself and it becomes popular

Tragedy of the Microsoft just doesn't sound as nice though

I doubt anyone is calculating

Remember how GTA5 took 10 minutes to start and nobody cared? Lots of software is like this.

Some Blizzard games download 137 MB file every time you run them and take few minutes to start (and no, this is not due to my computer).