[mscman]

There's a legal issue with universities though. While the research being done may be public, they could also involve private corporate entities, restricted data, or patentable information. A lot of people forget that, while universities are oftentimes public institutions, they're also very large bureaucracies. Most of them are very sensitive to how data is handled and published, as incorrect findings, proprietary code, and other leaks can be very costly.

[Tehnix]

I think some of that can be solved with https://enterprise.github.com (which has an academic discount and offers an "unlimited campus-wide student license").

I can't clearly see how much maintenance you have to deal with though, so that might not be a viable suggestion without disregarding my original complaint.

[mscman]

That's a good point, there are enterprise hosted offerings. I'm just pointing out that the sell to higher level university officials to switch off of internal infrastructure to "cloud" offerings (yes, yes, I realize that word is overused) can be rather difficult.