Maybe I'm misunderstanding something here, but does apple pay them for this?

The point of this thread is that maybe Apple would pay if they were asked.

And how would you be contacting Apple, from your little 3-person startup in Paris ? You assume they have the means or contacts to do that; and IMHO the tweet is not that aggressive.

It's been done before, (e.g Intel has been called out for consuming kernel.org bandwidth and git CPU power) and is the simplest way to have people from inside BigCorp get a message.

No need to argue with me. I'm only explaining the original point, not making it myself :-)

But reviewing the thread I see you your question was in response to someone calling them "service providers" to Apple. So your question was entirely justified and it was me who'd lost context.

Lots of quid pro quo indeed, no harm done :-)

I want to add an answer that to those saying that gives information about Apple: it only says that somehow, one team inside Apple has setup a CI (badly written script) with maybe 5k tests (from a standard set for instance) and has 9 commits per day. Or maybe they have more commits, and less tests ? Or maybe, it's a matrix of 70x70 tests. Or maybe… well, all it says is that someone is experimenting with this.

Blacklist the IP range and throw 404s with "please contact us, we're throttling you because load".

> my service providers

Someone you get freebies from isn't a "service provider".