I do love personal websites - but the proper place for sharing code, where it can be forked and shared, is GitHub or a place like it. Plus, author has already licensed their code in a way to allow it anyway.
OK. Straighten me out. Explain the difference between sharing my 20 year old code on a personal sever with a license that says “do what you like” and posting my code on GitHub/GitLab/SourceForge etc.
That's not the problem. The problem is saying "the proper way to share code is with GitHub". There is no single proper way to share code, least using a commercial platform(s).
Personally I've become sceptical towards github since Microsoft took over it, and it's surprising to me that the open source community is so happy to use it in light of Microsoft's history of trying to fight open source.
Of course there would be a lot of reasons to use github, which I'll refrain from attempting to list since I'm not really an expert of that particular subject, but those benefits has to be weighed against handing over the control of such vast amounts of data to a huge corporation which I'd think its safe to say, primarily would be interested in profit and survival, rather than the wellbeing of the open source community. One might for instance consider the possibly of the data being used to train an AI, which in itself isn't necessary a bad thing, but that still raises some questions. Apart from that relying on github's, might lead to vendor lock in, and it might also mean that the processes that gets used to develop projects falls under control of a in a best case scenario selfish actor and in a worst case scenario a hostile one.
Perhaps you are familiar with the "embrace, extend and extinguish" strategy that Microsoft has been accused of employing? Things like these doesn't really inspire trust in the company's intention towards free software. Due to the size of the company, they are also capable of influencing the industry at large through various means, for instance via expensive advertisement campaigns, and to selling their solution to existing clients. So for instance they could create software such as VS Code and Teams, which would argubly be more or less copies of existing software, using their sizable pool of developers and then use it's huge marketing machinery to take over the market.
Even tough the open source community seems to be flourishing at the moment, there would be threats looming on the horizon. For instance the question of how to relate to service providers who can profit off of open source code, without really having to share back since the code is running solely on their own servers, another one being that open source code gets used to build closed solutions with the help of AI.
Personally I appreciate projects, that distribute code in the old-fashioned ways, which has proven to be successful in countless cases, and I would like to ask open source creators to consider the alternatives, and how they would fit in with the goals of the project. A lot of times I bet github still would be a good fit, but at the same time I'm sure that there are good ideas that could be implemented outside of those parameters.
Because it gives power to Microsoft to impose its will on millions of developers, and for little reason in this case, when the goal is just publishing software, and not development.
Its UI for presenting large number of software projects sucks, too.
You believe that Github is some kind of heritage organisation? Incentives are aligned now, kind of, except they train an AI that they sell to other people on your code. I use Github but do it with open eyes.
GitHub's track record on this so far is fantastic. Repos that were created 15 years ago and didn't see another commit since their creation are still there today.
Latest commit in CVS. I'm not sure what the Last Update date is about, but I think Sourceforge did some larger data shuffle in 2013, at least there are many orphaned projects where the site claims an update in 2013 even though nothing of the sort happened.
Downside is GitHub or any of the commercial git-hosting sites might use your code in ways you didn't intend e.g. machine learning, training neural nets, etc. Alternatively they might go out of business and go down after hinting you to save a local copy. These are countered by self-hosting your repo in your own (home/cloud) server.
Downside of self-hosting is time, money and effort. You've to spend for energy and hardware and your time and effort to keep them shipshape. Chances of it surviving beyond you are slim.
Both has downsides; just pick one depending on what kind of person you're. If you only want to write code vs that and also know how to maintain it. The latter is necessary skill if you ask me, instead of being just a code monkey.
