I’ve been running into this too and it’s very annoying. Although I don’t think it’s particularly new either.
Just feels like an unnecessary step. Sure I have an account and can log in, but why? I just want to know which file has X function, so i can read the implementation. I don’t want to have to download the repo or sign in.
Most likely anti-scraping measure. So they can detect and shut down bots or really anyone they feel like if activity looks nonstandard. Not suggesting it’s good, but it’s consistent with the in vogue trend to lock down recipient public APIs nowadays.
As an illustration, near the end of last year, bots from a renowned Email API provider spotted in less than 1 hour the leak of a public key from my public GitHub code repo. My account got suspended on their platform. It was stunning to see the speed at which they acted and automated the process to "lose" and "recover" reputation.
they have to serve the source without being logged in, otherwise gpl projects would just move (and we know gpl projects are the opensource trend setters).
so they will always allow you yo download the source. and thats what i do all the time. git clone, grep, rm.
or if you are logged, do it anyway checking code out with ssh which is more expensive for them.
remember kids, after Microsoft bought it, a github account is a social network account.
There are a lot more AI projects hungry for data to train their models on. This puts content companies in an uncomfortable situation: trademark infringement claims, loss of intellectual property, and more.
That's true, but there's an interesting parallel with GitHub's corporate parent, Microsoft, and Microsoft's other platform company LinkedIn[1]. LinkedIn sued scrapers for retrieving data from the site.
LinkedIn isn't a content company either, nor do they really own any content posted there (they don't right?), but a large part of their business moat comes from the network of people posting content there. Scrapers and bots undermine this, something the AI boom facilitates.
There is a cost to serving up all that content, and if hundreds of AI start ups are all trying to pull in data, that can add up fast. It’s not typical user behavior.
If it’s just static content it wouldn’t really be that expensive. In reality egress traffic is extremely cheap compared to what Azure/AWS etc. are charging.
How often are you not signed in to GitHub? You’re presenting this as a practical pain, but I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t signed in to GitHub.
I don't have a work GitHub account and I keep personal stuff out of my work computer. The number of times I've wanted to search an open source codebase without cloning it yet is significantly nonzero.
I've also wanted to do code search on my phone, where I have no need to be logged in so I'm not.
Can they let their business customers know that? Companies making their employees create new accounts for their org is not uncommon. I’m not talking about Enterprise instances.
If I'm considering reporting a bug I came across in a free-software project while at work, that's already something I probably couldn't justify with a strict cost-benefit calculation for my employer.
In practice my employer would be happy for me to spend my time doing it anyway, because it's the right thing to do. But asking them to pay Github for the privilege is pushing it.
I don't want to login to github.com when I'm on my work computer. That's going to take me one step closer to uploading company internal stuff by accident.
It's especially bad because I don't really remember my passwords, so I always have to reset password when logging in again, and that refreshes the dev keys so my terminal git push also stops works - a complete PITA.
GitHub still knows all of your individual visits to GitHub, and which repos you viewed. Most of the time I don’t want to be browsing GitHub itself whilst logged in. I don’t like or trust Microsoft with my location or waking hours or browsing history.
Just feels like an unnecessary step. Sure I have an account and can log in, but why? I just want to know which file has X function, so i can read the implementation. I don’t want to have to download the repo or sign in.