You also need to do it right away, as they are shutting off uploads today. This isn't just deprecation, but immediate removal of a feature. If it were just deprecation, it would stay up to give people time to change their practices. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deprecation

It should be noted that they are leaving the existing uploaded files available.

I knew that but I didn't think I needed to say that, but it can't hurt. :)

It still leaves some prominent open source projects, including ElasticSearch, with extra work that they need to do for their next release.

True enough. Certainly a hassle for the people who used it.

Anecdotally, I was always surprised when I ran across it being used, as it was a relatively infrequent occurrence. It seemed to always work well though, when I did. I was even tempted to use it for a few projects. Guess I will have to seek other avenues. Be it s3, dropbox, cloudapp, droplr, or something else.

If your binary files are not huge you can always add them directly to your repo (they don't have a repo file size limit anymore). If we're talking about multiple GB just go for S3, we're talking about cents per month.

Don't do that. After a while it really adds up and slows down cloning times.

Yeah, I'll likely end up using S3. Or maybe even bitbucket.

But there's a very real and somewhat irrational negative emotional response when going from free to not-free. Or alternatively, from included in private costs to a paid for feature taken away.

Or each repo might have a corresponding repo where only binaries are pushed, and probably the raw link might be used as a workaround.