As opposed to what? Buying a domain and hosting your own server? To answer your question: Some small programs would probably not exist at all without a service like github.

It's not necessary to buy a domain and host one's own server. For example, there is https://savannah.gnu.org/ , which is where Emacs itself is hosted.

What spirit of the project are you thinking of, and how is hosting stuff on Github antithetical to it?

>What spirit of the project are you thinking of

Free Software: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

>how is hosting stuff on Github antithetical to it?

Github is s a proprietary cloud service: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-se...

Thanks for providing these links.