Why would you ever do that instead of just download as zip or clone?

For JavaScript or CSS single-file projects it's actually quite simpler to wget the one file from the Raw URL (or copy-paste the contents into a new buffer in your editor), than to clone/download the archive and then move the file from the downloaded directory and then clean up the other downloaded files.

edit For example, `curl https://raw.github.com/documentcloud/backbone/master/backbon... > js/lib/backbone-min.js`

Thanks, but why would Releases solve this?

I have no idea :P

But that's the case for which I use raw + save instead of download the zip / clone :)