Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:
Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).
This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.
Can someone tell me why this is unreasonable?
I think it kind of flies in the face of what Open Source Software should be. They’re walling off code behind accounts in the Microsoft ecosystem.
I think it’s kind of a slippery slope; but I don’t think the search itself being login walled is apocalyptic. As long as anonymous users can clone the repositories and browse the code, I can kind of understand why they don’t want to pay to run an elastic search cluster for bots’ benefit. Presumably in-repo search could be done locally by scrapers’ hardware.
But if it turns into “login to view this repository” then GitHub will have turned evil.
They’re not walling off any code. They’re restricting use of their server-side search resources. Other repository hosting services don’t have code search at all.
It’s more gating off than walling. If it keeps access and usage free I’m ok with it.
Do you really think that’s where they’ll stop, though?
It is a betrayal to the developers who put our projects up there. We wanted everything to be freely accessible, and of course this is just another step in enshittification of the service. Remember that many of us have small projects with few viewers, and we know that the extra burden on the server side isn’t even measurable. Yet our work is less accessible.
The code is still accessible, you just can’t use the code search function in the web, which normal git doesn’t have anyway.
Yes, precisely. They built a useful feature and are now trying to wall off the garden. Enshittification.
On its own, it’s not. But it’s going to be one step on the path to shit-town.