Author of the post here. We're actively working on this at Sourcegraph. Up until recently, we've focused on working well on large private codebases, but looking forward, we have two big efforts that will make this a reality on sourcegraph.com:
1. Vastly expanding the size of our global search index to cover every public repository on github.com, gitlab.com, and bitbucket.org.
2. Enabling LSIF indexing (https://lsif.dev) in every major language for compiler-accurate code navigation (go-to-def, find-refs) across repository/dependency boundaries.
The latter is already working on a subset of languages for private Sourcegraph instances, and we want to scale it to the entire open-source world. We think a single search box that covers all the visible code in the world and allows you to seamlessly walk the reference graph is super super powerful and someday will be a thing that most developers use every day.
Neat. Are you considering adding other large source repositories such as the Debian / Ubuntu / Fedora / RHEL / CentOS source package archives? At least the main section of Debian should offer reasonably high assurances that using the sources in that way is legal.
Licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition or any of the similar definition from the free-as-in-freedom software community inherently must allow this as a legal use.
That said, the community often takes authors' wishes into account.
Out of curiosity, why would you want to restrict this? It's not like Sourcegraph has any exclusivity to the concept or the ability to implement it.
1. Vastly expanding the size of our global search index to cover every public repository on github.com, gitlab.com, and bitbucket.org. 2. Enabling LSIF indexing (https://lsif.dev) in every major language for compiler-accurate code navigation (go-to-def, find-refs) across repository/dependency boundaries.
The latter is already working on a subset of languages for private Sourcegraph instances, and we want to scale it to the entire open-source world. We think a single search box that covers all the visible code in the world and allows you to seamlessly walk the reference graph is super super powerful and someday will be a thing that most developers use every day.