Making something more efficient but also more useful can still make it more expensive because significantly more people will now use it.
In principle they could make it all login only, but hosting open source repositories is one of the main charters of GitHub or at least it was. So it makes sense and is consistent with that vision to keep code browsing free without login. Not to mention the requirement to be available on search engines.
Code search however doesn’t seem like it’s some mandatory part of that mission, I mean all they’re asking is that you login. People in this thread seem to have a chip on their shoulder believing corporations should just give them compute for free. No they don’t!
It's amazing how you can make something explictly worse, specifically to fatten your bottom line, and have people cheer you for it.
If the goal is openness, i.e. why GitHub has the prestige it does, allying itself with open software development goals, then you should be able to do most things without having to sign up for the service. That includes browsing and searching. Neither of these need your identity.
On the other hand, if GitHub really just wants a walled garden with paying customers (either directly or the money to be made from datamining their identity and activity), it ought to shut itself off completely and get no benefit from being associated with openness.
What they've done is insidious. They're open, they're the trusted custodians of open source, but ah ah not really. For a preem experience you gotta pay up, choob! They let you search for 15 years but now they don't. And here you are cheering them rather than questioning them.
What's next? The certificate transparency project requires sign-up and logins, it's just too expensive to let anonymous users see the transparency logs you see, and by some amazing co-incidence, everyone signed in @google.com sees no results for mis-issued GMail certificates?
In principle they could make it all login only, but hosting open source repositories is one of the main charters of GitHub or at least it was. So it makes sense and is consistent with that vision to keep code browsing free without login. Not to mention the requirement to be available on search engines.
Code search however doesn’t seem like it’s some mandatory part of that mission, I mean all they’re asking is that you login. People in this thread seem to have a chip on their shoulder believing corporations should just give them compute for free. No they don’t!