curious: why use own hosting rather than github?

[Erazem Kokot]

> Just wanted to add my 2 cents into discussion. The beauty of open
> source that anyone who has enough resources can create a fork and
> maintain it, and send patches to upstream, eventually the repository
> which has more contributors will become upstream itself. Those who
> want to prove that github will help project can create a fork there,
> and synchronize changes with upstream. If you succeed and you would
> have more contributors than original project, the fork will become new
> upstream, everyone will benefit from that, If not than it will prove
> that github doesn't provide any benefits.

While what you said is mostly true, forking a project without a good
reason (e.g. the old one being abandoned) doesn't benefit the old
project. Also forking a project without the permission of the original
owner would mean that fork being a new project in which case the name
would have to be changed for copyright reasons (afaik).

An unofficial mirror doesn't make much sense, think about how you would
manage contributions. If you as a Github maintainer of the mirror accept a pull
request, how are you going to make sure that the PR you already merged
is going to be accepted upstream? This also means that most clueless
users will contribute to the Github repo, possibly not even knowing
about the mailing list and most likely won't discuss their pull requests
and or bug reports here, but on Github, which would mean that the
contributors wanting to fix bug would have to watch Github to see bug
reports.

So unless an official mirror is made (which would mean more work for the
current maintainers), this would in my opinion be a bad idea.