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A lot of those 80% projects on github without licenses are simply not meant for public consumption. Think things like bash or emacs dotfiles or class notes scribbled into a txt file or a very personal project that has no hope of working anywhere but on the author's machine. I think people overstate how "post-licensing" people view open source (née free software). For everything important, people still mostly slap free licenses on their projects.

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...which is probably why it's a better idea to keep those projects in private repositories outside of Github. Yet somehow, people keep forgetting there are other project hosting options (Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc.).

> which is probably why it's a better idea to keep those projects in private repositories

Not necessarily. Public dotfiles are easy to link to in conversation, and "users" are likely to be people who just copy and paste some interesting lines. A license is probably irrelevant for, eg, vim configuration options.

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