> > Also, if you choose to not pay the Maintenance Fee, but find yourself returning to check on the status of issues or review answers to questions others ask, you are still using the project and should pay the Maintenance Fee.

I think this is going to hard against the "economy of gift" and isn't going to play well in the end. If they were hosting their own forum / mailing list, charging to access the community would make sense. But the forum is hosted by a company that gives it away for free. The people posting are posting freely (and may not be associated with the project). Some of the people posting answers are members of the project, but some are not. If the maintainers get an answer from someone else are they obligated to pay the answerer a maintenance fee?

I would limit this to "if you find yourself asking about an issue or posting an issue", since those are points where you are looking for help not just from the community at large, but from the maintainers in particular.

I can't imagine that clause in particular is actually compatible with githubs own eula. It's hard to believe github would be okay with people attaching additional licenses to make use of any of their features. Could I throw a $10 fee to use git clone too?

Maybe it's a play like any of those license less open source projects, corporations will be so horrified to use your software they'll stay away, but hobby devs won't really worry about it.

I would encourage you to read through the first couple pages of the Open Source Maintenance Fee website. I think you'll see there are a lot costs you're not taking into account.