OsmAnd~ provenance and permission question

This started as a simple "why does OsmAnd~ now require Google Play Billing Service permission" question, and then just kept getting harder.

A first answer to the initial question is easy enough: the com.android.vending.BILLING permission was added to the manifest here: https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand/commit/275ea7728cac21815c633af4722d0066f0fc273b

But that commit message doesn't say anything about why. And that commit only includes the change to the manifest, it doesn't include whatever code changes require the new permission.

There is a FAQ for "Why does OsmAnd require permission X?" here: http://osmandapp.github.io/faq.html#permission and it doesn't mention the billing permission at all.

That was when I found out it's not even easy to tell where I should be looking for definitive information about the app. Its f-droid metadata says it is built from https://github.com/osmandapp/Osmand which seems to be a good repo, but the wiki there says to refer to the wiki at https://code.google.com/p/osmand/

So that looks like the definitive wiki is on google code, but the repo there ends at this commit https://code.google.com/p/osmand/source/detail?r=016f4acd3b33a808262fcf3642b479c595a2a1ce back in March 2014. The github repo has about 8000 newer commits, so that seems to be where the code is happening.

I can't tell whether github or google code would be the better place to post an issue to the OsmAnd project asking for an explanation of that permission.

It would be good if at least f-droid could say something about it....