Thanks Danie, you have given us a lot to think about.
Personally I just like to see more code being open sourced.
IMO, SAOSS as an overarching OS movement, creating interest and motivation for more SA/African open software should be good enough. So, essentially, your last option should be good enough.
That being said, there will be ad hoc software contributions where a whole bunch of files will be sent. I guess for those we could just compress them into a single file.
When we start our project, we will use Git internally and probably host on GitHub since it’s so popular. However, Bitbucket, GitLab or others are also acceptable since they support Git. I like GitLab since they support the whole software cycle and promote CI/CD. However GitHub, I know, can also get there by integrating to 3rd party tools like Jenkins.
I think the idea is let’s just get started and see where we get to. We can easily migrate to a cloud repository later.
The other query I have, is what is deemed a contribution? Software and other artefacts like dev., analysis, design docs? Also should the contribution emanate from Africa only? The reason I ask is that big multinationals like Suse, Redhat, Google, etc could easily crowd our hall of fame.