There's also one issue not mentioned in this article:
Lots (if not most) of the code has documentation so poor, that there's no way to determine what it's really worth other than looking at the code, examples, tests. Github does it right by enabling you to browse the code right away and make your opinion.
This is also the reason why Sourceforge and other *forges are doomed - and to a lesser extent google code too. They present complicated interface but all in all you end up downloading the tgz only to determine later that in most cases it wasn't what you're looking for. All that buzz because of the premise that said package is actually worth your attention. Well, usually it's not (but probably is for someone else). So it is right and sane to give an opportunity to decide it as quickly as possible, by showing the code tree as quickly as possible.
When I visit a GitHub page of a new project that I find interesting, I would like to hack on or use as an end-user I don't even have to click on the clipboard icon to get the URL. I just take the URL straight from my browser and put it into my terminal to obtain a local copy over https, or by changing https to git and adding .git at the end:
Can you tell me off the top of your head how to checkout the source for $RANDOMPROJECT on sourceforge? What's the common URL to browse the sourcecode? One of my buggest complaints about sourceforge is that there is no easy way to grab an actual URL of a package for a project to download without manually editing it if you wanted to cURL or Wget it to a remote server you are shelled into. After enough years I've learned to download packages from sourceforge using this URL form:
Lots (if not most) of the code has documentation so poor, that there's no way to determine what it's really worth other than looking at the code, examples, tests. Github does it right by enabling you to browse the code right away and make your opinion.
This is also the reason why Sourceforge and other *forges are doomed - and to a lesser extent google code too. They present complicated interface but all in all you end up downloading the tgz only to determine later that in most cases it wasn't what you're looking for. All that buzz because of the premise that said package is actually worth your attention. Well, usually it's not (but probably is for someone else). So it is right and sane to give an opportunity to decide it as quickly as possible, by showing the code tree as quickly as possible.