That's right, but that's because the way a lot of us imagined this did not involve relying on third parties with other agendas to host cost that we write that others rely on in production.
> It's 2020, we should have some way to connect them
We do: set up your own hosting for projects that you provide that others rely on in production.
Oh, that costs money, you say? First, hosting is cheap these days. Second, if your code is used by so many people, at least some of them will probably be willing to pay for it.
Being a software developer is a well-paid job indeed, but that guy was offering (some of) his work for free, and apparently other developers made some use of it. And now you are blaming him for the fact that he was not also paying extra for being able to share his work.
As much as I support self-hosting and not relying on third-parties, attitude like this is bullshit.
It's not the guy's fault that Github behaved poorly, yes.
It is the guy's fault that he relied on an untrustworthy third party to host his code that lots of other people were using in production, meaning they lost access to it when that third party screwed him.
> now you are blaming him for the fact that he was not also paying extra for being able to share his work.
No, I'm blaming him for using an untrustworthy third party to provide production code to other people who were depending on him. If he can find a way to provide his code to others for free without doing that, that's fine.
Btw, I probably should make clear that all of those others who are using his code are also to blame if they don't have a plan in place to deal with this situation.
Also, "paying extra for being able to share his work" is not correct. If he's willing to share his work with the explicit disclaimer that he doesn't control the access to the shared hosting where the work is available, so he makes no guarantee that others will always be able to find it and access it, that's fine too. But clearly he didn't intend to share his work with that disclaimer. And the only way to be sure others can access your work is to host it yourself, so you control access.
He can literally git push to any webhost and they can literally git pull from there, or has everyone just forgotten how git and the web actually works? He can drop a zip file somewhere the way we used to do back in the ancient days. And that's not even considering the plethora of other hosted Git portals he could push to as well.
And everyone still has access to their own repositories. They only thing anyone has lost here is momentary convenience.
No, what we all lost here all the other meta-information which is not code, but is still part of the project.
I agree, he could (at least for the code itself--he can't do that with other meta-information, as another commenter pointed out). But apparently he isn't since Github locking his account appears to be such a big issue for him. (Unless he is already up and running on Gitlab--he says he's moving to there.)