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.
Microsoft is terrible. Remember they also require you to use a Microsoft account for Minecraft now. Fuck this company so much
And they’re also deleting/deleted all classic Minecraft accounts from before that. They invented an incredibly weird and needlessly obtuse process to extend the migration deadline by 3 months (true final deadline is now mid December 2023), but that’s seemingly it. Everyone not paying too much attention to their email just gets $30 worth of game deleted because of a completely arbitrary decision.
Anyone without access to their old email also loses their account. I don’t remember which email address I used with my account back in the day (it’s at least ten years old), and since I bought my key from a reseller, I don’t have a receipt. Microsofts response was basically “not our problem, guess you’ll have to pay us again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”
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.
So, Azure’s bot protection is crap. Good to know.
People who haven’t hosted anything bigger than a two digit daily visitors tells Microsoft how bad their bots protection is.
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Google can accommodate billions of searches globally on pages it doesn’t control
Microsoft can’t index a tiny fraction of that number, even for it’s own users.
What a black eye for Microsoft engineering.
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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.
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The code is still accessible, you just can’t use the code search function in the web, which normal git doesn’t have anyway.
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This has been implemented since like 2016, this is not news lol.
This has been around for a while. It may be so they can track and throttle LLMs hovering up public code repos.
Either way, it’s a meh. Not sure why anyone would want to clutch their pearls over this. For those who need it, self-hosted gitlab is available.
I’m not sure LLMs will need to use the search facility when they could clone the repo.
I’m pretty sure this only applies to non-indexed repos right?
indexing is a very expensive process and usually takes 5-10 minutes for repos with 10k+ lines, and letting non-registered users start it is not the best idea in the first placedeleted by creator
