I actually dislike that fact very much. Oh, I don't disagree that github is that for so many users...and i can not disagree with the convenience of what github provides...I simply dislike that it is all controlled/owned by github...a single point of technical/infrastructure failure, and a single corporate entity where so much content (content beyond raw code, that is) is hosted...not unlike the facebook effect. I wish people hosted their content in a more decentralized fashion.
Do you mean downloading using unsupported 3rd party tools? Because those have to be regularly updated to ensure they even work and could some day stop working entirely if Google decided to care about blocking such tools.
In comparison, GitHub offers a simple clone button (among ways) which gives you everything.
And the point of that argument is that youtube-dl only works because Google doesn't care, and the need to patch it regularly is only caused by the incidental changes in the service. When Google starts caring for some reason, it'll be a difficult battle.
it could be easy to rip, but exact word "rip" is indicating that you are going against service provider's SLA. Meanwhile GitHub is providing tools (git) to get, share content which fits in their SLA.
Everyone says that people want a decentralized set of repositories for open source. I have never seen it happen and instead we just get better and better iterations on sourceforge.
Is there a github clone people can host on their personal site that handles git, wiki, issues, and pages? Not talking about gitlab either. Only for hosting at the project level to keep things simple.