I'm not sure why people are defending Github on this issue, what if the original repo was a template or something, and your thousands of lines of code is gone because the original template repo removed you as a contributor. If I copy something, I expect where I copied it from to have exactly zero bearing on what happens to my copy. If they have a problem they can serve legal documents, giving everyone time to figure something out with zero data loss.
This only applies to private repositories. Do not put templates up as private repositories, and do not use forks when consuming templates. That is not what forks are for.
You’d be surprised at how many use GirHub as their remote code backup platform. Having private file system backups is a question of culture, and a lot don’t have it.
