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Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

theregister.com

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Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#11

Post by snoopy_telex »

olliej wrote: post #5
olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

Quick googling says 300 million in annual revenue, but a -155M net income or -61M profit margin (how are they different?) So that’s somewhere between 0.6% and 1.5% of their annual loss according to the claim it would save 1M a year

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention... says "Hopes to save a quarter of hosting costs by binning repos that haven't been touched for a year", so perhaps it's from looking at cost centers more then just the company wide costs.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#12

Post by xyzzy_plugh »

kyrofa wrote: post #7
richbell wrote: post #2

The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.

Indeed. The fact that they're also limiting free organizations to 5 members (counting members of sub-groups)[1], which feels truly arbitrary, seems to agree. [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...

I seem to recall GitHub making some similar changes just prior to being acquired. Perhaps they are trying to make their books look good for suitors?

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#13

Post by eslaught »

kelnos wrote: post #6
olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

> it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense. This is a really great insight that I hadn't thought of. Sure, if they, from the start, had promised to do so, that would be one thing. But users of free plans are essentially freeloading (sure, there are useful network effects of h…

The thing is, policies like this make it really hard to manage open source projects, which (a) typically do not make a lot of money, and (b) in the very long tail, are sometimes "dormant" according to this metric. And the cost goes up the more projects you have and the more services they're spread over.

If they really wanted to save only on costs, surely they could have gone for the biggest repos first? E.g., politely email owners of large-but-inactive repos to consider spinning them down, and then if that fails to move the needle, then put in a policy (starting with big repos first).

There's no reason for someone's 1k LOC project to get swept up in something like this. The costs for that must be trivial.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#14

Post by judge2020 »

bevelwork wrote: post #4
richbell wrote: post #2

The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.

Looks to be about 250M/year [source]( https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2022-03-14-gitlab-re... )

While they have 884M cash/equivalents, they did have a yearly 157M Net loss, compared to 192M net loss last year. That's some good improvement but it means there's a lot of work to be done before they reach profitability. So I don't think they're strapped for cash, but there is likely pressure to make enough changes to reach profitability within 3-4 years.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#15

Post by eslaught »

I've had open source projects be dormant for 10 years only to get a question pop up out of the blue from someone who found it useful.

I hope that Gitlab and other hosts of the open source community think hard about this before implementing any policy like this. There are projects that are useful, and stable, but for whatever reason do not have a lot of users. There is no reason to let those projects die, or force the maintainers to have to do a song and dance to keep them around.

Yes, there's a cost, but there's a benefit too, and I hope these hosts of the open source community remember that.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#16

Post by bredren »

kelnos wrote: post #6
olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

> it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense. This is a really great insight that I hadn't thought of. Sure, if they, from the start, had promised to do so, that would be one thing. But users of free plans are essentially freeloading (sure, there are useful network effects of h…

There was a time when sentiment was very against GitHub. Iirc, it was when prices went up before Microsoft acquired the company.

GitLab dined on that, and really any time negative press has come from GitHub.

I don’t think people would have been pushed the move it to GitLab narrative If they had foreseen this.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#17

Post by UncleEntity »

olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

At who’s definition of dead?

I have one project which I use all the time which is basically finished, once in a great while I have to fix some minor thing when python changes their C-API or I get bored and add some minor feature because I wanted to figure out how to do something in python. From the outside the project is “dead” as I barely ever touch it, just recompile when I do an OS upgrade and forget about it until the next python version bump.

I honestly don’t think anyone else has used it, its a python wrapper around boost:: property_tree which I use to transform rss xml to json, but it does contains a lot of magic to do things using the python C-API which are pretty hard to figure out because there’s no documentation so I think the real value is having examples to look at. I spent many wasted hours figuring out how these things worked by reading other peoples code and adding them in the easiest way possible. Might someday save someone a bit of time…maybe.

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#18

Post by ArrayBoundCheck »

olliej wrote: post #3

I was kind of surprised that the hosting of such stuff was a significant enough cost that removing it was seen as worth it - but I have no idea what their annual revenue is, and a million dollars is a million dollars. That said, they were talking about deleting dead projects from unpaid accounts, and it does seem kind of shitty that as a community we seem to have decided that once a company has hosted some content th…

I'm still wondering why there isn't a bittorrent for git

Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

#20

Post by crgwbr »

gloryjulio wrote: post #19
richbell wrote: post #2

The fact that they walked this back so quickly suggests that they either are strapped for cash or have extremely out-of-touch leadership. Both are worrying.

Quoted post unavailable.

GitHub is owned by MS, not gitlab.
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