this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
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Open source devs consider making [bandwidth] hogs pay for every download (www.theregister.com)
submitted 1 month ago by Aatube@thriv.social to c/tech@programming.dev
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note to mods: this is an opinion article, but it contains a lot of newsworthy statistics and prose on Maven (Java ecosystem package repository) being used as a CDN

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[–] Deebster@programming.dev 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Throttling efforts led to "brownouts" via 429 errors

Does this mean for the (ab)users, or for the repo? If it's for the bandwidth hogs, then the brownouts are properly a good thing, as it'll force people to pay attention to these otherwise unmonitored systems.

Also, if it makes the upstream service seem flaky and unreliable, it could convince users to set up the proper caching proxy just for self-interested availability reasons.

I can see some companies happily paying for access, as they'll think it's easier than paying someone internally to manage a proxy/mirror, especially as on-prem is unfashionable lately.

[–] Aatube@thriv.social 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

for context, the full sentence is "Throttling efforts led to “brownouts” via 429 errors, but patterns mutated, forcing a "Whack-a-Mole" game, especially since most consumption is headless and unnoticed." so they tried to use brownouts to control it but it couldn' t stop them

[–] Deebster@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

Yeah ok, I guess that's what's meant.

I'd be interested to know how the patterns changed - perhaps requests moved to IPv6 which made grouping request origins harder, or maybe too many unconnected users were coming from a single IP and getting false positives (leading to bad UX and support requests).