You would prefer Facebook or Twitter? Or that they implement yet another authentication scheme and store their own accounts and credential database?
There's no free lunch. The OAuth providers are, on balance, pretty good at what they do and a better choice for account management at small sites. This one happened to pick Google.
> Or that they implement yet another authentication scheme and store their own accounts and credential database?
Yes, either this or openid. I don't have an account at google. I don't want an account at google. While it's a lower barrier than a facebook login, it's still enough that I'll bounce off the site when I see it.
I think github is a nice choice for a site like this, you could even do a rudimentary look through their public repositories to see what languages they generally use and give targeted examples.
I don't know about you, but I have a windows desktop, a windows laptop, and a macbook pro that I regularly work from in different contexts. I much prefer cloud services that store my account information, and let me log in from whatever computer I want ... local storage would remove that benefit for users like me who don't really care that they're using my google login ;)
There's no free lunch. The OAuth providers are, on balance, pretty good at what they do and a better choice for account management at small sites. This one happened to pick Google.