ok but splitting it up you'd still upload the same total size, unless the proposal is about stopping distributing some large things.

In practical terms I would need the source-jar for nice IDE integration, but would need the sources if I'm to patch things in OSS spirit.

What about legal aspects? I thought the license would mandate to include the sources with distributions; if this extends to documentation you'd need to include the full source tree with each documentation package, or split up the documentation in a separately buildable project. Maybe providing a link is enough, I really don't know, but it feels a bit going in the wrong direction.

Maybe removing sources from the dist altogether - but providing clear pointers to them - would motivate more people to clone the github repository, that could lower the resistance for some contributions?