Name of the software
SHC

Project/product Homepage
https://neurobin.org/projects/softwares/unix/shc/

Why we should include this into the repository, i.e. what does it do that the alternatives do not?
A generic shell script compiler. Shc takes a script, which is specified on the command line and produces C source code. The generated source code is then compiled and linked to produce a stripped binary executable.
The compiled binary will still be dependent on the shell specified in the first line of the shell code (i.e shebang) (i.e. #!/bin/sh), thus shc does not create completely independent binaries.
shc itself is not a compiler such as cc, it rather encodes and encrypts a shell script and generates C source code with the added expiration capability. It then uses the system compiler to compile a stripped binary which behaves exactly like the original script. Upon execution, the compiled binary will decrypt and execute the code with the shell -c option.
Quite handy if you need to have a password in your shell script and wanna hide it.

Is it open source?
Yes.
https://github.com/neurobin/shc

If it is open source, please provide a link to the most up to date, versioned source tarball/zipfile. master.zip links will not be accepted.
https://github.com/neurobin/shc/archive/3.9.6.tar.gz