Is it _really_ open source if even just viewing anything requires an account?

You can explore the public projects here: https://opensource.ieee.org/explore

I wish there was a less email-centric workflow to contact the HN mods, because I think your link is much better than a sign in page for showing off the intended content

The key phrase for licenses like MIT is "free of charge". It's fair game for IEEE to require registering for a free account to download from the source, but it's also fair game for one brave user to download and host elsewhere without the registration.

It's a discoverability problem of that particular page; as a sibling comment mentioned, it's possible to view the public project, it's just that this site has no link to /explore - just /search from what I could see.

Is it really open source if there's no repo at all? Absolutely

It’s perfectly valid for someone to just release tarballs of their source code releases. You don’t need a bunch of infrastructure to share software.

The GPL allows you to not publish the source, as long as you provide it on request. Several older “open source” projects were distributed exclusively by CD-ROM.

Yes. Open source is about being able to modify and redistribute code for the products you already have access to. It's not about just giving everything to everyone.

New release book on Git for Electronic Circuit Design:

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-8124-6

How exactly is this related?

It's a Git book for electronic CAD and for those with EE (IEEE) background.

An IEEE service that would be actually useful.