In principle, the decentralized nature of git means that you don't really have to do this sort of thing. Just clone and be done.

But in practice, I do often find myself browsing my own code on GitHub for a variety of reasons:

- I'm in their office at their machine, but didn't bring my laptop.

- I'm traveling and want to talk about something with someone (I travel with a separate laptop).

- I'm half way through a big refactor and want to go back and see what master looks like. I know how to do this without GH/GL, but the simplest way to do that is to just pull up GH.

In all of these cases, and others, it's far easier to just pull up the file on github than it is to clone the repo locally.

So, given that we do sometimes want to browse our code remotely, the author then provides the (rather niche) criteria that make this a better solution than GH/GL:

"By serving a repo behind an FTP interface, we get these benefits:

- Web browser supported but not required

- Minimized network traffic, sending just the file data itself

- Supported on all platforms, with dozens of clients already written

- Support for both the command line and GUI"

Agree with you that this is a fairly niche set of criteria, but I could at least imagine myself in an environment where this could be a useful tool.