[Pxl_Buzzard]

This appears to be a move to meet package managers halfway. Yes, tools like npm and go have great integration with git repositories, but others like NuGet still require a hosting source. Long-term, you could imagine package managers forgoing their own hosting services in favor of letting GitHub be the primary host who takes on the issues of bandwidth, availability, access controls, etc. It's another vector for GitHub to compete in FOSS.

[bbatha]

It’s also good for githubs economics to be able offload data from git itself to easily mirrored versioned tarballs. It’s much more cost effective than mirroring constantly changing master branches or worse whole git repos for clones.