Response from Martin Woodward, GitHub’s VP of Developer Relations:
Sorry for the inconvenience @koepnick - while searching across all repos has required being logged in for a long time, when we enhanced the search capabilities earlier in the 2023 we had to extend this to repos as well (see https://github.blog/changelog/2023-06-07-code-search-now-requires-login/).
This is primarily to ensure we can support the load for developers on GitHub and help protect the servers from being overwhelmed by anonymous requests from bots etc.
It’s 10-20x more searched for than Gitlab, and even more compared to smaller alternatives
Ok. But alternatives exist and users have choice. If Github fucks up tomorrow, a user exodus can be triggered just like that. It’s not too hard to migrate from it.
Plus the open source code space is vast. Huge. And the means of distributing it are quite diverse.