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GitHub: Can no longer search code without being logged in
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bArray 3y agoI have another one: You can't logout of GitHub without enabling 2FA. You can't log a ticket about it either.
- from-nibly 3y agoWas going to say that the comments on the link is a dumpster fire, but it looks like HN is not much better.
- sogen 3y ago4X
- doublerabbit 3y agoNothing other than Microsoft's attempt to stop AI from learning repo code.
- 1231232131231 3y agoI doubt they would use the code search feature instead of just cloning the repo and feeding it to the AI.
- doublerabbit 3y agoI don't doubt it. If you wished to build a ML bot that taught switches/loops; instead of cloning every repo all you'd need to do is search for switches/loops within X lang.
- yodon 3y agoVery inefficient way to do data access for more realistic training objectives.
- doublerabbit 3y agoWhy else do you use search? If not to find a specific piece of code.
- yodon 3y agoHuman workflows are very different from large scale LLM training or augmenting workflows
- beeboobaa 3y agoThat would be ridiculously slow and inefficient.
- doublerabbit 3y agoAnd downloading a blind repo isn't?
- beeboobaa 3y agoMuch less so. It can easily be parallelized without running into rate limits of the proprietary search API. Then once you've cloned it once it's on your system and you won't have to talk to github again. So much more sensible.
- doublerabbit 3y agoSensible isn't a thing when it comes to malicious activity. Same could be used to cheat the search. Downloading a repo and than neither knowing the repo has the syntax you wish to learn is still going to be more resourceful than having a webpage thrown at you with all search results.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoThey probably want to use user info on what they search for, what they use, etc to better filter between good/bad popular/not-popular code for finetuning things. If people can search anonymously it gets a lot harder to datamine
- odyssey7 3y agoRetrieval-augmented generation could be the specific AI use case they’re guarding against if they’re restricting search but not cloning.
- vasvae3 3y agoThis has been happening since... forever? I guess code search requires a lot of processing power so they'd rather know who's doing it in case they need to be throttled.
- nuc1e0n 3y agoNo. It was possible previously. The whole search feature on github seems to have been rewritten recently with several regressions in functionality.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- aaronmdjones 3y agoI stopped being able to do GitHub code search without being logged in several months ago. The search bar would search through open issues; clicking code on the left in the results prompts me to login. Has been this way since at least June.
- riv991 3y agoThey wrote a pretty interesting blog about the rewrite. https://github.blog/2023-02-06-the-technology-behind-githubs-new-code-search/ https://github.blog/2023-02-06-the-technology-behind-githubs...
- nuc1e0n 3y agoI wasn't aware of the specifics. I was only going by the UX changes. Good to know more detail. Thanks
- henriquecm8 3y agoYeah, I used to use github to search for codes that I don't remember in what repository I used, by searching for keywords that I can remember, but that doesn't work anymore.
- dontupvoteme 3y agoPart of microsoft's AI moat is about controlling competitions ability to use information on github. I would not be surprised if they start restricting git clone next.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ljm 3y agoCould you still call code open source (in line with the repo’s license) if the code is gated behind a login, or even a paid subscription? IIRC GitHub is already rate limited to slow down excessive cloning or API usage.
- VWWHFSfQ 3y agoYes of course because neither of those things are relevant to the license.
- rcxdude 3y agoYes. You can put a piece of code behind a paywall even. The only requirement under GPL and similar copyleft licenses is to make the code available to those you make the software available to (which can be only paying users, if you so wish), and to allow them to redistribute it under the same terms (which tends to mean that if you do make it pay-only, one of your users can just publish the code if they wish). Absolutely nothing in any commonly used open source license requires anyone to post something publicly and freely.
- anthk 3y agoThe user can ask for the code without paying any fees.
- rcxdude 3y agoYes (though the GPL does allow you to make the code available via post and charge a reasonable postage fee), if they're a user in the first place. You don't need to give the code to anyone you didn't distribute the software to.
- fotcorn 3y agoA charitable interpretation might be that search requires a fair amount of compute, and is therefore a big denial of service vector. I am not sure how much behavioral data GitHub can gather from logged in user, and how useful that is compared to the code that is there anyway. Maybe to figure out which parts of code are important? But that isn't really user-specific.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoYes, it's a real problem for anyone offering any sort of search capabilities. Like, about 0.5% of the traffic to my search engine is human. I'm not aware of any search engine that doesn't have similar stats.
- hskalin 3y agoOff topic: how do you determine what percentage of search is coming from humans?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWell about 99% of the search requests I got back when I was using cloudflare couldn't get past their bot-mitigation, and of what made it through, at least half looked very automated.
- superkuh 3y agoI'm a human and I can't get past cloudflare "bot mitigation" with my browser. Bot mitigation actually just means your browser executing the latest bleeding edge javascript functions to make sure your behavior is monetizable.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoNo that's not actually true at all. The website always worked with text-only browsers, cloudflare or not. Thoroughly tested with the likes of w3m and dillo. Virtually all of the traffic that was intercepted claimed to be modern Chrome or Safari or similar, which should be capable of "executing the latest bleeding edge javascript functions". The primary reason why anyone gets shit from bot mitigation is IP reputation, this is far more important (and effective) than looking at browser characteristics.
- mtmail 3y agoStarted at least 6 months ago and was announced in their changelog https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/ https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-req... (HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230929 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36230929)
- echelon_musk 3y agoSurprised to see this as news as it feels like it's been years at this point. I can scarcely remember when I was last able to search without being logged in. I understand perfectly why this has been done from a business standpoint as it invariably increases 'user engagement' by driving people to become literal users!
- rldjbpin 3y agothis. that has been my personal experience as i browse github without being logged in for the most part. even searching a specific file name inside the repo has been locked behind the same way.
- skilled 3y agoI still can’t get over the fact that GitHub blatantly disabled regular search in favour of some Git mumbo jumbo nonsense that forbids you from looking up recent code. Any new technology, be it an API or otherwise, you can’t explore it on GitHub because “search by recency” is no longer a thing. What an asinine thing to do. My GitHub usage has dropped exactly to 0% for this very reason. I know I am not alone either since their org forums is filled with complaints about this. Not going to use any strong words but I want to. Disgraceful UX choice.
- simonw 3y agoThere's a forum thread about that here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/52932#discussioncomment-5862537 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/52932#discussi... > We are thinking about way to make this work in the new code search system, but don't have a date for when it will be possible.
- asabla 3y agoI wonder how much scraping for various purposes, but maybe more directed towards training LLM's, has affected this change?
- g-b-r 3y agoTo train LLMs it seems asinine to try to scrape things instead of making a clone. The only automated searches I could envisage to MAYBE be happening are those looking for vulnerabilities, and there are probably only a few dozen actors doing it. State actors seem actually more likely to use clones of everything.
- lloydtao 3y agoas an alternative, you may add `1s` after `github` in your address bar to open the repository with a browser-based VS Code, and then use Ctrl + Shift + F to search across all files
- jve 3y agoWhy do it via 3rd party if you can just change github.com to github.dev and get 1st party VSCode? Or better yet, just press "." (dot) character on keyboard and VSCode will pop up. But that is repository search only, of course and not github-wide. https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/the-githubdev-web-based-editor https://docs.github.com/en/codespaces/the-githubdev-web-base...
- Andoryuuta 3y agogithub.dev also requires being logged into github.com.
- lloydtao 3y agoironically, if i'm not mistaken, github.dev requires being logged in
- benterix 3y agoA useful tip, thank you, but I think it will ask you to authenticate which is the OP's main gripe. EDIT: No, I was wrong, you can search it without authentication.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- stilist 3y agoMy problem with code search is that when I’m searching I’ll randomly get dumped to github.com/search with the search blanked, and anything I put in the search box at that URL is ignored. I have to go back in my history until I’m in the normal GitHub UI again. My search has also been discarded there, but at least I can interact with it.
- daft_pink 3y agoI suspect they are trying to block bots like everyone running a website with useful data these days.
- Ayesh 3y agoI run a small website that tracks releases of a software, it probes releases every few hours, with each run consuming a several hundreds of API requests. GitHub API token limits are pretty generous. There is no paid offerings to increase the limits, so I suppose if you ask GitHub nicely, they will increase the limits given a reasonable justification.
- dylan604 3y ago>it probes releases every few hours I can't think of any software I've ever used that I was this concerned about release schedule. Even if I was a user of your site, I might check it daily, but even that is doubtful.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoThe bots can still do a git clone and index everything, this just inconveniences normal users working on "some other" PC (or browser or incognito tab), where they are not logged in, and/or don't want to log in (coworkers PC, 2fa, whatever).
- Turing_Machine 3y ago> The bots can still do a git clone and index everything Of course they can, but then they're gonna be chewing up their own disk space and bandwidth for anything after the initial hit. I think the real problem is that the bots hit the GitHub servers over, and over, and over again.
- mmahemoff 3y agoMaybe if the bot operators have the resources, but it's far from trivial to keep an up-to-date mirror of every project on Github, especially if Github is actively putting up barriers to prevent it. Once login is required, it becomes much harder to bypass rate limits because the company can rate-limit signups from unknown domains, enforce 2FA, etc.
- simonw 3y agoI'm ready to believe the most charitable explanation for this: the new code search (which I have found to be exceptionally good) has a lot more going on under the hood than a normal search engine, which makes it a lot more resource-intensive - limiting it to signed-in accounts saves a huge amount of server resources that would otherwise be used to serve crawlers. My guess is that the trade-off here is genuinely a question of if they spend 3-4x (I'm guessing, but I think this is likely a low-ball estimate) on their search infrastructure, v.s. having people angry at them for requiring login to use the feature. I actually built my own code search tool for use with GitHub repos, but I've mostly stopped using that because the new GitHub code search is so useful by default: https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/28/datasette-ripgrep/ https://simonwillison.net/2020/Nov/28/datasette-ripgrep/
- Fatnino 3y agoThey were already rate limiting unauthenticated users. So are expected to believe that a hostile user who has zillion of ip addresses (to get around the rate limits) won't also be able to make a handful of accounts?
- ldoughty 3y agoMight also help with thwarting easy access to tokens/keys... especially for those that are not currently in their filtered list. While a bad actor can certainly scrape/clone the same data... Given repos with thousands of files... Scanning by scraping vs searching vs cloning.... Search is certainly the cheapest for the attacker while the most expensive for GitHub
- Thorrez 3y agoThat could be mostly solved by requiring login only for searches across all repos. Searches in a single repo could be anonymous. In fact, that's exactly how it was until in June GitHub started requiring login for searches even in just a single repo.
- 1980phipsi 3y agoIf the new code search is more resource intensive, then why not have a slimmed down, less resource intensive version for when users aren't logged in?
- Zambyte 3y agoThis is honestly very low on the list of things I dislike about Microsoft GitHub. git clone + rg still works fine anyways.
- phailhaus 3y agoThis doesn't seem to be much of a problem given that making an account is free.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoYes, but does come with some checks and balances: an e-mail account (allowing them to filter out any dodgy domains or throwaway services, a captcha (bot detection of sorts anyway, may be hidden, would also be used for public search), a barrier to entry via their signup procedure, etc. And then they would have a unique token - your username / ID - to help detect flooding / scraping, set a limit of e.g. 100 searches per hour or whatever they have deemed normal and acceptable behaviour.
- h1fra 3y agoIt's fair to assume it's very costly to run and has been abused by bad actors. I'm actually surprised it was open to begin with.
- renegade-otter 3y agoGitHub search is not exactly supported by ads. It was a much more, uh, baffling decision to have limited public access to Twitter, which is literally ad impressions. I guess I can't comprehend that level of business genius.
- niam 3y agoHas there been an update on whether the "they literally couldn't afford their cloud hosting bill" theory was bunk?
- T3RMINATED 3y ago[dead]
- Jean-Papoulos 3y agoThis issue blows it way out of proportions. The code is still freely available, Github just doesn't want to give away resources for free because it's a for-profit company. If you're mad at a for-profit company for not giving away things for free, you're simply delusional.
- g-b-r 3y ago> This issue blows it way out of proportions. The code is still freely available, Github just doesn't want to give away resources for free because it's a for-profit company. If you're mad at a for-profit company for not giving away things for free, you're simply delusional. GitHub is still giving away resources for free, they've done it forever because it was their business model: attract as many people as possible through open source repositories, a fraction of which will then use their non-free services (and more recently, also to train AI models). Now that they're so dominant (and owned by Microsoft) they can afford to worsen the services, but people have every right to be pissed about it and push developers to move their repositories.
- bilkow 3y agoI've been using sourcegraph when I'm not logged in, which has also the bonus of being a lot better (at least when compared to the old search). It's as simple as appending the repo URL, starting from github.com: e.g. sourcegraph.com/github.com/rust-lang/rust/ (you can try searching for unit on this repo)
- gsich 3y agoKPI driven development.
- zxt_tzx 3y agoTo those arguing that GitHub needs to do this because search is resource intensive, why can't GitHub put their code search behind something like Cloudflare Turnstile? See e.g. Troy Hunt doing this for HaveIBeenPwned: https://www.troyhunt.com/fighting-api-bots-with-cloudflares-invisible-turnstile/ https://www.troyhunt.com/fighting-api-bots-with-cloudflares-... I have had my own issues with Cloudflare Turnstile (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412057 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412057), but in principle, I don't see why can't this be done
- amadeuspagel 3y agoHackerNews: Can no longer view the frontpage without seeing a complaint about a free and ad-free service not being provided to users who are not logged in.
- mattstir 3y agoIf it's free, then you are the product. That's an adage that holds true in most cases, and in this case, your code is being used to train Copilot, among other things. Even if that weren't the case though, and the service really was as benevolent as you seem to believe it is, would you be sitting there clapping as the service gets worse for a decent subset of users? Is that exciting and interesting to you?
- xign 3y agoEven if your open source code is on GitLab they can still be used to train Copilot. Most permissive license allows you to train AI models using them. Any license that forbids AI training would not be considered "open source" under most definitions. Being on GitHub just makes it easier for them as they don't need to manually clone it from a different service.
- tentacleuno 3y agoDo you have any references for this claim? I browse HN pretty much everyday, and "I can't do X without logging in" doesn't seem to be a popular type of post. The only example I can think of is Reddit's API changes, which were a while ago and loosely related to logging in.
- 0xbadcafebee 3y agoControversial opinion: when a service provider makes antagonistic changes to its service, it's actually a good thing, as it pushes people to find different solutions and not depend too heavily on one service provider
- myaccountonhn 3y agoSometimes yes… sometimes it progresses way too slowly.
- jehb 3y agoCan we please stop treating GitHub like it's an open platform? It's not. It's a closed, walled garden like every other one. The fact that they host a bunch of open source projects you use doesn't make them better; if anything, it makes them worse, because they've helped these projects wall off a part of their contribution infrastructure behind the lock and key of a corporate account.
- bbkane 3y agoI think it also needs to be said that GitHub has helped countless open source projects grow- Git Hosting, wiki hosting, issues, GitHub Actions, GitHub Pages, a nice API... There are LOTS of reasons to host your open source project on GitHub
- anthk 3y agoThe are more reasons to run away from GH and just set a locally managed SourceHut instance for sanity and interop.
- pjmlp 3y agoSourceforge used to have similar reasons.
- ApolloFortyNine 3y agoAnd if github truly goes to shit like source forge did people will just move to a clone. But if you look at any source forge repo right now, I think you'll see github as a long way to fall before it gets that bad.
- mmahemoff 3y agoThe web has really closed in 2023. StackOverflow, Reddit, Github, Twitter all put the brakes on scraping and API access. The trigger was preventing AI training combined with a push to increase profitabilty due to commercial realities (tech recession, new ownership at Stack and X, Reddit wants to IPO). I believe a long term effect will be a rise in the marketplace for proprietary data. Search engines, AI tools, anyone who needs the data will have to pay for the firehose or API access. (That, in turn, may cause antitrust issues if only the richest companies can afford access to that data.)
- xign 3y agoTo be fair, GitHub still has vast majority of features available as public anonymous API end points other than code search. It's just that they are rate-limited a lot more aggressively. And making a GitHub account is free and not terrible intrusive. Even then, all APIs are rate-limited even if you are logged in anyway as they don't want you to kill the servers (that's why tools like https://gitstar-ranking.com/ https://gitstar-ranking.com/ have troubles because they are relying on free accounts to scrape all repos' GitHub stars). As for the actual important data (source code), you can simply clone the repo anonymously using HTTPS endpoints, and do your code search there (e.g. there are third-party websites like https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/ that can do this). The issue with say Reddit/Twitter is that the source data (posts/comments/upvotes and tweets) is no longer available via APIs, making it impossible / hard to build third-party tools. With GitHub, the source data is still easily accessible, with search (the auxiliary layer) disabled for non-logged-in users. I think they are quite different situations and mixing them together is not useful.
- pixl97 3y agoIt's been going on longer than this, but this year has had a lot further locking down... https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people https://theoatmeal.com/comics/reaching_people
- Hizonner 3y ago... and everybody will just think it's normal for "StackOverflow, Reddit, Github, Twitter" to sell access to content that other people created and own... If something is truly proprietary, then the compensation should go to its owner, not to some random Git server operator or whatever. And the owner, not the server operator, should be setting the price and terms. If the server needs to make money, it can charge for the basic service itself. On the other hand, if somebody created something to give it away, on a platform that at that time provided a channel effective for giving things away and advertised itself as suitable for giving things away, then the platform changing the rules midstream is morally piracy of that person's work. Probably a very large fraction of the material on those platforms would never have been put there in the first place if the actual owners had expected random restrictions and arbitrary access charges. If they want to radically rewrite the rules like that, then they need to not sell access to any preexisting content unless the original creator explicitly opts in. But we had Reddit, for instance, actively reinstating posts that had been mass-deleted by their authors specifically to prevent that kind of abuse.
- mkl95 3y agoThis is annoying at worst. I search code without being logged in 3 or 4 times a year, and I'm very active on GitHub.
- beyang 3y agoIf folks want to continue searching open source, https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search does not require sign in and also includes major projects that are not on GitHub. (Full disclosure: I'm the Sourcegraph CTO)
- charcircuit 3y agoThank you. I don't want to sign into my personal github account on my work computer, so I always use sourcegraph if I need to search a repo. I remember longing for the ability for github's search to rival git clone + grep, but I never expected a login wall to come with it. IIRC I expected the login wall to just be because the feature was in beta and would be removed when it became the primary search.
- potamic 3y agoWhy did you decide to allow search without a sign in but not for cody?
- asylteltine 3y agoI really don’t mind at all and neither should you
- mattstir 3y agoWelp, everyone pack up. This one person has decided that there's nothing to mind here.
- yladiz 3y agoEven if I agreed with the position of person who posted the question (which I don't really, because search is not necessarily cheap and could be used for a DOS style attack), why do people feel the need to be like this? Like, what benefit is saying, "Is it not enough to monetize every bowel movement, you now feel the need to track which individual lines of code I'm browsing?" here? Chill out. The underlying argument isn't even that good. Besides that repos themselves are _not_ gated behind a login and so an open repo is able to be accessed publicly, including cloning the repo, if the point is that the author wants his repos and code to be useful to the public, then if there is ever a need to interact beyond just downloading the code and searching, such as creating an issue or making a PR, that contributor would necessarily need to log in.
- g-b-r 3y agoYes, there is very often a need to quickly search in source code (to figure out how something works, to discuss about it in places other than GitHub issues...). Cloning is usually fast but not with very large repositories, and you might not even have enough space on your current device to clone them. By the way if a lot of people will end up cloning everytime instead of logging-in (after all logging in to GitHub is a pain with the 2fa) I don't think their systems will have less load. And not everyone might want to have a GitHub account
- lakpan 3y agoTo be fair, I’m surprised it was open in the first place. For a website that does not have any ads, having its enormous amount of data not only readily available but also searchable felt like a bad choice. What I hope never happens is the actual enshittification of the site for logged in users.
- g-b-r 3y agoWhy a bad choice??
- adocomplete 3y agoThis is pretty disappointing on GH's part. They seem to be moving further and further away from things that made the platform great. https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search has a really powerful code search can be a pretty powerful alternative and allows you to search codebases without logging in and across different code hosts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 3y agoGithub has not allowed site-wide code search without a login for years. What seems to be new new is that you can't search even a single repo. You can just clone it and use your local tools. If the code is hosted or mirrored elsewhere, and elsewhere uses GitWeb, you can use GitWeb's grep search.
- behindsight 3y agoBeen using https://grep.app https://grep.app for that Original HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22396824 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22396824 Sourcegraph works too: https://sourcegraph.com/search https://sourcegraph.com/search
- spoiler 3y agoSearching code server-side (especially with the newly added intellisense-ish features) is probably expensive, yet they think they deserve such a feature for free, when code searching/browsing isn't GitHub's primary goal. Why not either learn to use local code search tools and clone a repo, or just log in and search then? Are either of these things such a hurdle? I sympathize that the person opening the post is frustrated by the chain of PEBKAC events that unfolded, but that's not really an issue with GitHub. The issue opener is behaving like an entitled toddler by making his problems "societal" problems. Honestly, the lack of self awareness with some people is astounding.
- zelphirkalt 3y agoYes, this is standard now on Github. I noticed this weeks or even a few months ago. Now I often resort to cloning repos and running my own dumb grep. Thanks for being helpful, Github.
- greybox 3y agoI imagine Microsoft view the code on their platform as an asset, as they can use it all to train AI that they can sell on. They don't want anyone else doing the same thing with the code on their platform.
- wruza 3y agoAlso this ide-in-browser by default(?) broke the ui. I can’t even h-scroll code on mobile without wasting half of the phone’s charge.
- saagarjha 3y agoI see a lot of people upset about the openness of the web or whatever, and I am too, but I don't see many who point to specific harms that this causes. Of course, this leads others to believe that the complaints are nitpicky and lazy. Since I use this feature heavily, I feel like I might weigh in why this really sucks. First off, I have a GitHub account. But I'm often in contexts where signing into it is annoying, and intentionally so (it lets me push code!) I usually don't want it on my work machine, even though I search GitHub a whole lot from there. Some of it is of course related to my job directly, which you might plausibly make the argument for that my employer should somehow compensate them for a free service that indirectly makes them money, but a lot of it is literally my work computer being a second machine that I work on, with open source code running on it, and usually these searches are to contribute value back to the community–either because I want to file a bug against it later, or maybe even deciding whether it is worth my while to contribute code to it. And I do this all the time from other devices, too: I might have logged into GitHub on my phone once, but my iPad? My mom's computer? Being able to search GitHub is an excellent way for answer people's tech questions at any time, much like if Google asked you to sign in everywhere it would be a massive pain. Second, and also quite important, is that I can't use GitHub links as a way of pointing people at code anymore. I frequently (check my history!) will post a comment like "yeah the Foo project uses bar API a bunch like this, [GitHub search link]". It's a very quick and very direct way of sharing this information. Of course I have no idea if the people on the other side are logged in or not, which means that if you put them behind a login wall I will slowly stop sharing these, because people will complain that they can't see what I sent them. It's the same way I hesitate to send people links to Twitter/X these days, because whether the content will be accessible is a coin flip. And I'm definitely not going to ask people to clone the repo (on what, their phones?) to see what I'm seeing, so I might as well link to Sourcegraph instead.
- api 3y agoSo it begins... Now that the entire programming world has just about hard coded GitHub into the very center of everything, it's time to start enshittifying.
- zackmorris 3y agoYou all talk a big game, but your actions are ineffectual. You don't consider the leverage you have to "encourage" Microsoft to turn public GitHub search back on. Real leverage looks like all of us banding together to boycott Microsoft's most profitable income streams. Not GitHub. But cloud services like Azure, and Office, gaming, etc: https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/these-2-revenue-streams-account-for-60-of-microsofts-top-line https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/these-2-revenue-streams-acco... It's about making unilateral ensh*ttification decisions like this so expensive for parent companies that they become unthinkable. The board and investors sometimes need to be reminded how expensive these decisions really are. We've all seen stock prices tank by half in one day since the Dot Bomb. A weak signal starts a big wave in this age of algorithmic trading. A high-profile company publicly switching to AWS/GCP to avoid eating MS's sh@t sends a strong signal. More importantly, after everything that MS has put us through over the decades, divesting is FUN! :-)
- xign 3y agoI mean, GitHub is still by far the most open source friendly repository hosting service by orders of magnitude. I wish we have code search back for anonymous GitHub use as well, but the simple fact is there isn't another service that comes close to providing free service to open source software. Now, I know that GitHub built its reputation on hosting open source software so it's probably not fair to compare other services like BitBucket or GitLab to it, but I'm not sure what people are thinking they can divest to.
- fyokdrigd 3y agoeveryone here will forget we only have encryption today because openbsd was in Canada. every usa based project had to quit shipping any cryptography code. but who cares about history. who cares you can only participate in some open source project today if you have an account with usa companies? nobody cares. screw the Iranian engineering student. and hope the usa doesn't outlaw encryption again.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Dowwie 3y agoYou also can't sort code-filtered search results by last-indexed anymore. The removal of this feature imposes a new tax on searching popular domains of work involving rapidly changing APIs and library preferences, such as deep learning.
- anonacct37 3y agoI have a simple guess. We are in a post zirp (zero interest rate policy) world. I've seen very large companies embracing degrowth. Quite possibly Microsoft told it's subsidiary GitHub that they needed to spend less money and this is how they save resources while impacting the users they care about the least.