Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think the author is trying to insinuate that GitHub is in the wrong in any way. They explicitly say they understand the decision, and anticipated that it would happen. I don’t want to quibble with the term “abuse”, because I think in this scenario it depends on whether intent is a factor and whether we should trust their stated intent. But depending on how you look at it, GitHub would be just as likely to ben…
Hire them? Why? There’s nothing technically clever or novel here. Anyone can create a shell script to generate random commits and push them. I’d bet even GPT-3.5 could handle that. Why should GitHub hire them?
Nothing technically novel. But evidently it was at least a somewhat novel stress test execution for GitHub’s live systems, otherwise surely it would have been dealt with sooner and messaged with less benefit of the doubt to the user.
Investigating the limitations of something doesn’t have to be novel to be interesting. It’s been a while (I think), but for example there’s been plenty of praise here for Netflix’s own stress tests of its live systems. The tests are often really mundane, eg just shutting some stuff off or triggering known error conditions. It’s interesting not because the nature of the fault is novel, but because systems are complex and it’s a way to learn about their failure modes.
I’m also not saying GitHub should hire them (and kinda I doubt they’d want a QA offer based on reading other blog posts on their site). Just that a hire would plausibly be similarly beneficial to a ban.