The advantage of having it in go get would be that no one has to rely on a single point of failure like gopkg.in, nor would they have to get new urls recognised there, and finally that it could become an accepted way to version dependencies instead of the versionless future golang lives in right now. They did add versioning to the lang after a while so hopefully this will be similar. It's not a huge deal anyway right now, it'll become more important as the pkg universe grows.