Public GitHub repositories remain public and can still be accessed without a GitHub account, including repositories owned by paying customers. However, a subset of unauthenticated clone or fetch requests may now be asked to authenticate as part of GitHub’s protections against abusive traffic. If you receive a 401, update your application or script to use GitHub credentials.

Uh okay.

did microsoft just lock up a good chunk of open source behind a (stochastic (for now)) login wall?

this feels like it should violate the gpl, but i bet it doesn't. truly devious.

Our aim is to make public repositories accessible without authentication as much as possible. However,...

It's new reddit then. I was still using Github as a shitty backup for my projects, but an alternative may be required faster than expected.

I deleted my repos on github and moved to a mix of codeberg and selfhosted forgejo.

But I do occasionally fork/clone/reupload random projects from github to github so they have to spend money on storage and the scrapers.

Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.

Time to leave github! Boycott is the only language companies understand!

This might be a problem for many projects. Rust, comes to mind, that pulls everything from Github and is 100% dependent on it. Same as Go. They pull everything from Github.

It might make sense for them to use something like radicle, a distributed git. Many people can easily pick what they want to distribute. Scripts can be written that make the local node only host the projects you depend on. That would naturally make popular projects more available.

Holy crap this is huge!

Open source is no longer open source on github.

First time ever seeing color in a post title

Our aim is to make public repositories accessible without authentication as much as possible. However, like much of the Internet, we continue to see significant increases in the volume of robot traffic recently which has increased the need for verification, for example CAPTCHAs.

As I expected, it's about combating (excessive) bot traffic.

I believe that it is some fuckup and they don't know where exactly problem is and while they are looking for a way to fix it they've created plausible lie. When they'll fix it or believe that it's fixed there would be a public announcement like 'we heard the community and reversed our decision' and users will be happy. There is a serious need for github mirror, they are becoming less and less stable every year.

AI bot problem is real and there is no good solution to it. Look, I very much dislike GitHub for various reasons BUT currently there is no good way to throttle AI bots that literally trash web. They are like that geeky classmate who can never hold his liquors: it's nice having them around for some answers, but they ramble a lot and shit/puke in random places of the house making it unlivable.

This seems reasonable. Cry all you want but if even smaller sites are getting overwhelmed with bots imagine what it's like for GitHub.