Whether this specific problem is intentional or not, these kinds of problems show the issue with using a single centralized service for distribution of third-party dependencies. But it's just so much more darned convenient than hosting your own Git server! It would be super cool if there was a decentralized alternative to GitHub, that used Git under the hood. Perhaps one would upload their repositories to a node, which would then be synchronized with all other nodes, and all you would need to do to use it is to specify any_node.com/author/project. This would keep GitHub's discoverability, while allowing all the benefits of decentralization.