Hmmmm, that's a damn good idea. /project is for projects, and the canonical true ruler of such. /~dude is for programmers and their forks, half-baked ideas, and random pushes. Yeah, that'd work.

That's about the model Gitorious uses (minus the integration into debian packaging and apt repositories).

In Gitorious the project is the main resource. Developers can be working on a project and they get their own area where they can put forks of the project or other one-off stuff.

You can even easily (for a definition of easy as "doable with some effort") host one yourself for internal projects as it's available under AGPL.

It's still not as easy to use as github (due to the project hurdle and less refined UI) and the public service lacks what makes github especially good: the large community of users

If anyone does something like this, I'd suggest supporting not just http://junk.launchpad.net/~jmillikin/ but also something like http://junk.launchpad.net/~~jmillikinpersonalwebsite.com/ , embedding other domain names in URLs for your service (with a policy of only permitting people to set up such double-tilde URLs in your service when they control the corresponding domain). Then to the extent that your service ever enjoys a success disaster where newbies naturally discover that all the mnemonic usernames like newman and whn and wnewman are already taken, you have relieved the pressure by providing a mechanism to delegate the unique name problem to the existing domain name system.