This is a great idea. I pushed my own projects to bitbucket lately. It's much better to fork, or monitor projects this way. If anyone still keeps their potentially useful projects on a blog or in some forgotten `~/tmp` directory - please upload them - it doesn't take much time, and someone else might find exactly when it's needed.
github/bitbucket is the new pastebin ;) (for projects)
Indeed, publishing code is good. Getting crits and reviews make you a MUCH better coder. So does making code that other people use. Which can be very different from writing your own code, or writing code that programmers in the same room have to use.
I now prefer launchpad with bzr 2.x series. There's more room on there than those pay sites. It's nicely integrated with ubuntu services (like ppa compile farm etc). Also I can make bazaar projects of my other projects on google code, github, etc.
Plus the launchpad source code has been released. I feel safer not relying on a closed source tool if I don't have to. Also, there is a better chance I can make modifications to it if I want.
I'm only one week into my latest love affair with bzr/launchpad... and so far so good. I hope it doesn't break my heart again.
Google code has svn or hg support, but limits you to a small amount of projects. Whereas the other ones limit you by disk space.
I hated the 1.x series of bazaar, but now it seems to be good quality, and stabalising. There are now stable, and development releases, and the last default format change before the 2.0 release was in 2007.
github/bitbucket is the new pastebin ;) (for projects)