The recent left-pad fiasco on NPM just showed that in order for free software to be reliable, it must be stored permanently (since the license allows it).
Github, the most popular project hosting platform at the moment, allows users to delete their repositories. That's very dangerous considering that many programs that aren't packaged by distros will likely be lost forever if their developers ever decide to delete their repos (and that can happen for a number of reasons, I myself deleted some repos in the past); and since Github (unlike Savannah) is a for-profit site, there is no guarantee that the data will always be available to everyone, or that they won't shut down (it already happened with Google Code, BerliOS and Gitorious, after all). I think developers should be allowed to abandon and disown their programs, but deleting them can only do more harm than good. I've already seen many programs become lost forever (due to unreachable websites hosting their tarballs, mostly), and that can never be good. The Archive Team ([0]) started mirroring SourceForge but they put the project on hold, and I think they were mirroring the whole site, which makes the projects very hard to search. Mirroring the repositories and/or the tarballs on Archive.org (with proper tags, if possible) would be far more effective, but in any case I hope someone with the right skills can understand the importance of this issue. [0]: http://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Main_Page
