I'm speaking from direct experience over the past few years, from my home, work, and outside with a phone. Do you actually browse GitHub anonymously, or are you reflexively shifting blame?
Yes I actually browse GitHub anonymously. Not always but I do it every day. Never once had a problem.
In another browser I log in because I do work with code in GitHub frequently. I comment on issues and PRs and all the normal stuff.
I regularly drive two browsers, yes. I alternate between them multiple times per minute, often. In one, I am not logged in. In the other, I am logged in.
Not once have I hit any anonymous rate limit.
I respect one’s desire to use something without logging in, that’s fine. But what you do when you use up the free tier of a service is one of the following: A) you pay for the next tier, B) you (in this case) log in so that your usage is no longer considered “anonymous”, or C) you wait for the next usage measurement period to begin so that you can resume.
It’s their service and they can decide how they want to provide it, in the exact same way that you can decide how to provide any services that you might provide.
If it is your privacy that you are considering by not having an account, fine. By making that choice you are limiting yourself to whatever the services you use decide to give you, and you are entitled to nothing.
“I could do more in the past!” So what? They decided to let you do more in the past, and now they’ve decided to let you do less. They don’t owe you free services; you choose to use the free service and by doing so you’ve chosen to be bound by any usage caps that they decide to apply to you.
Nobody owes you free services AT ALL, but you’re getting them anyway. Instead of feeling entitled to more than you’re getting, maybe be thankful for what you have.
I have a really hard time believing you on this. There's visual evidence from a year ago and it's consistent with my experience. And no, I haven't been hammering their servers.
So, I'll repeat what I said in the first comment that you replied to. GitHub captured the open source ecosystem under the premise that its code and issue tracker will remain open to all. Silently changing the deal afterwards is reprehensible.
> Instead of feeling entitled
Again, I'll just repeat yet another one of my comments. Microsoft didn't just give, they're benefitting massively from open source. And they're looking to extract even more value through data mining from forced logins and stealing GPL licensed code by laundering it using AI. Open source projects that chose GitHub didn't agree to this!
> be thankful for what you have
You can't be serious. Yeah, be grateful for the trillion dollar company buying a service it didn't create, extracting as much value as they can from it in questionable ways and tearing up social contract!
If you need more proof, this is last year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39322838
And this is another year before that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36254129
Oh look, there's even visual proof in the discussion:
https://imgur.com/a/github-search-gated-behind-login-BT6uRIe