Some good points, but github doesn't take the place of a community. When it's working well, it helps, but when there is a breakdown of collaboration and communication, you get one of those codebases that has been forked 1298 times where none of the people doing the forking is sharing anything. That's a community fail, not a version control system issue.
I do think that it'd be nice if the ASF offered git alongside svn, and concentrated on the community aspect of things, which it does tend to do fairly well.
Just because you can't 'see' the fork with subversion doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I'm sure plenty of ASF projects are 'forked' within companies and the code is never shared.
What I've been advocating for a while now on the members@apache list is that the ASF look at using Github (either they host it or the ASF does) as the basis to build a new type of community that the ASF has never experienced before. Something that isn't tied to the old school.
Sure, github may bring more things into the open, but it is ultimately just an aid to a community of people, who must communicate about the project. You can't just dump the code on github without communicating with other people working on it.
I agree that outsourcing some of the infrastructure to github might be an interesting idea.
I do think that it'd be nice if the ASF offered git alongside svn, and concentrated on the community aspect of things, which it does tend to do fairly well.