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.
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?