Except that every other site links to your repo on GitHub and all the Issues, pull requests, Wiki and Website are there.

Well, hosting everything with a service that is backed by a company and over which you have no control was never a good move. See how Rainer Gerhards hosts his rsyslog (http://blog.gerhards.net/2013_12_01_archive.html): one canonical repository, and GitHub as a peer. Given git's distributed nature, there can be as many clones in as many services (Gitlab, BitBucket, others) as maintainers deem sensible.

The same could be said of gitorious.org shutting down, but for the past 8 months it's been inaccessible by the Web or via git. It's just recently returned as a read-only archive (thanks to archive.org, I believe); they claim that clone URLs should work again now, although I've not had reason to try one yet.

Keep in mind that even with announcements and long shutdowns, many projects would be lost without officially-sanctioned archiving; either because their author has moved on, or they might do all of their project interaction via git commands and never see warnings on the Web interface.

This is like saying that rsync and dropbox are the same thing. A github exodus is certainly possible, and it's great that github doesn't have a ton of tight lock-in (though it has some) via proprietary crap, but it's still a lot of work to leave github.

Incidentally, have you seen the original Dropbox post on HN? The second top comment is all about how it's pointless because you can "trivially" build the same thing yourself with FTP and other assorted software.

Except that the git is the least important part of GitHub. The real value is in the community and the extra services that it provides around the git source control system.

To move away from GitHub one would have to not only clone the repository (and all of the branches, tags, etc), but also scrape off the Wiki, Issues, and contact information of contributors. Then they would need to set up an alternative with a similar security infrastructure and notify everyone relevant to its existence.

subtile source insertions- would you notice them?

There is not even a measurement tool for trust on commits right now. Nothing like- (Line / NrOfDiffrentComittersTouching)* ComitersTrustworthyness according to other Projects * NrOfSimilarUnreviewedLines

Where there is no metric, there is no trust, not even in open source.

No it's not if you want to have feature parity.

Essentially it is, though:

http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_...