It harms the opportunity cost of the projects that reside within it. That's a real harm.
And I think the point is that while GitHub is there, use it. If it closes off, or goes bust, migrate. You can extract all your data - keep a backup elsewhere. At worst, you can move to Gitorious. I mean, currently they use JIRA for bug tracking - that's not an open project either, that's run by Atlassian.
Projects choose to go to the ASF. Who are you, or anyone else, to tell them it is not the right choice? Billions of dollars are made and saved every year thanks to ASF software (hell it's even in space)- there is a reason for that.
Can the ASF environment be improved for its projects? Of course it can - see my other comments where I address this point.
You're right of course - and I should have tempered my post with caveats about "if the poster is correct", and "I don't really know much about the internal workings of the ASF".
The main point I was trying to convey was just that there's a cost to not improving things, just as much as there's a cost to things getting worst.
And I think the point is that while GitHub is there, use it. If it closes off, or goes bust, migrate. You can extract all your data - keep a backup elsewhere. At worst, you can move to Gitorious. I mean, currently they use JIRA for bug tracking - that's not an open project either, that's run by Atlassian.