That's great, but I'm still slowly moving my projects over to Github.

1. I get much more engagement from random developers on Github. On Github, random people will fork and add features, do code reviews and leave comments. All of these things are technically possible on Google Code but nobody does itprobably due to the usability but possibly also a cultural problem. Github has a strong culture of collaboration because they strongly emphasize it in the user's experience.

2. Managing forks and pull requests is easier on Github. I want my life as a maintainer to be as easy as possible.

3. Notifications: For a long time, Google Code notifications simply didn't work for me, at all. I'd randomly stumble on one of my older projects and noticed 5 new issues opened that I didn't know about, I felt like I betrayed my users for 6+ months. Now they seem like they do, but some trust has been lost.

4. Multiple choices of documentation markup on Github is appealing.

5. The code browsing feature on Google Code feels like its own application. When you open a Github project, first thing you see is the code. On Google Code it takes 2 more clicks (that's 1 more click than Bitbucket). Think about what's the most important thing herethe code, and Github got it right.

As far as version control goes, I'm happy with either Git or Mercurial.

Why doesn't anyone ever think about the users? You know, the ones that just want to grab some binaries and do stuff?

In the "old days", projects would have a webpage with some instructions, screenshots and downloadable binaries. The effort required to do this would pay off in terms of polish and would attract more users.

Today, people find out about this supposedly nice piece of software, and proceed to find only a source file listing, no documentation (not even a half-decent README), no screenshots and, worst of all, the need to build from source. I'm a technical person with a fair amount of curiosity for these things, and I find myself frequently bummed out and give up when I see a link to github.

Even when these "artifacts" exist, just the look of the site is enough to put regular users off.

Sharing code is not only about dumping a source tree online. It's about polishing all that surrounds it and makes it a "product". Without users a source tree has no value.

Frankly, the current situation is making the open-source community more and more closed in on itself. The first step for irrelevance.

I've never seen this. Any concrete examples?

Any project on github. Put yourself in the shoes of a user that doesn't want to donwnload source. He lands on a github project page and just gives up.

For a regular user (where "regular" depends on the type of software and the technical skill it requires), this is going way back to the days of source sharing on Usenet, way before the open-source term was mainstream (or even coined).

Why would someone go to GitHub if they don't want to download source code?

Please, an example.

Example: https://github.com/rack/rack homepage url points to http://rack.rubyforge.org/

https://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri => http://nokogiri.org/

https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew => http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

https://github.com/joyent/node => http://nodejs.org/

etc, etc.

It also seems fairly common to put the 'consumer' url near the top or bottom of the README.