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Comment by cheald | Hacker News Reader

You can still clone and grep, can't you? You can't file issues or submit PRs through Github without an account, either.

You're kind of making my point, one needs to take their code elsewhere to be able to browse it.

In other words, GitHub is no longer suitable to host open source repositories because of all the closed "extras" it adds on top.

How does providing more features to some people make the core service unusable for "open source"?

This is adding less features for libre software users. I hope everyone migrates to local SourceHut servers when possible.

Are you suggesting that there's a place that you can file a PR (or equivalent) without an account?

They're shady AF, but some features require an account not because they're moat water but for some other reason.

I'm really focusing on the search feature that's no longer available for a given repository unless you're logged in. Everything else is "Microsoft added extras to git". If all I can do on GitHub is use it to git clone, then what's the purpose of it?

It's clear the "extinguish" phase of Microsoft's open source venture has started. There're plenty of very good alternatives, it's time to move on.

There is actually such a place! The Linux kernel (the original use case for Git) is developed by emailing patches to the appropriate mailing list. The mailing list is compatible with self-hosted mail systems.

But you still need an account. email one in this case.

You need an e-mail for GitHub as well, but in addition a GitHub account

You don't need an account to read the list.

http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html

Unless you count your ISP of course.

You don't need an account to browse GitHub PRs or issues either.

You don't need an account to send email. You can send emails using nothing but a CLI tool on a *nix machine. Although most mainstream email services will send those to the spam folder these days.

I thought damn near every ISP blocks port 25 outgoing. I even had to open a ticket to get it unblocked on a vps I use.

probably for the best.

Do you mean "git clone"? I thought the idea about git is that you always take the code into your local machine before doing anything. Sure, github gives some bells and whistles to obviate the need from time to time, but that's basically decorations.

And can you search a git repo on git://my-domain.example.com? Or can you browse that without cloning? And even cgit, can you search that?

Are these now also no longer "open source"?

No.

None of this is somehow a core requirement of "open source".

You can browse code on Github just fine (and search within a file!) - you just can't search through the tree, which is a function of whatever platform the code lives on, be it your box or Github or some other web UI.

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