I'm rather pleased - I had emailed GitHub a month or two ago asking about the potential to get DOIs for repos, and here they are.
Worst case, GitHub and Figshare both go under and we're back to where we started. The one hesitance I have is about the Figshare/DOI'd repo being frozen in time - I keep making arguments to myself about how this is a good idea or a bad idea.
Well, the thing with git, is it keeps history anyway. There's no need to actually freeze the repo in time -- but the DOI can be to a URL representing (and linking to) a particular moment-in-time of the repo.
Is that what they're doing? That actually seems like a pretty good idea, if it is, I hope they are! And if they're not, it would be trivial to do.
Github's UI still makes it easy to see what happened after (or before) that point (including the 'latest' version), but if you're citing software used as a tool for research results, it makes sense to be able to cite the actual software that really was used, not it's hypothetical future evolution.
well, if your aim is to reproduce the results of the paper, then you really do need the frozen version. I would probably just add a note in the Readme that says development is ongoing and users who just want to use the code should probably clone master or some such. Hopefully, it will become common to also include automated configuration (say Ansible playbooks) with the source.
Worst case, GitHub and Figshare both go under and we're back to where we started. The one hesitance I have is about the Figshare/DOI'd repo being frozen in time - I keep making arguments to myself about how this is a good idea or a bad idea.