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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?



> If the goal is openness, i.e. why GitHub has the prestige it does, allying itself with open software development goals

I guess that is why Microsoft acquired them.




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