Becoming a member means sharing your personal information with GitHub and abiding by their terms of service. It also implies that they will then track and profile locations where you sign in, technologies you use to interact with their services etc. That's a lot to give for "I want to browse a piece of code someone made for free".

The only bit of "personal information" you need to provide is an email, and you're free to use a burner.

> That's a lot to give for "I want to browse a piece of code someone made for free".

You can still do this. All repositories are accessible without signing in.

And it's what they get in return for hosting and providing indexing and a git server.

I'm not saying it's a deal that makes sense for everyone. But it's certainly a barter trade and is well within their prerogative to offer.

Facebook recently estimated that knowing about a user costs close to €11/month. That's a lot of money for hosting and indexing git repositories... I guess we need an alternative.

And it's EXACTLY the same on Codeberg, and GitLab, and SourceHut, and anything else online. Some of these don't even have a "search" feature.

This is just degrading in to conspiratorial FUD.

Giving them your personal information is a form of payment. I don't mean this in a pedantic or academic sense, but a very real one.

Not at all. FOSS should be built on FOSS tools.