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.
That is GitHub. This is about GitLab.
Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#22I'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…
Ditto. Sometimes stuff reaches a point where it's mature or stable and doesn't need more development. Sometimes life gets in the way and years down the road someone stops in to pick up the torch. That's open source.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#23Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why.
There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying.
If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't be able to keep developing our software without deploying infrastructure we have to maintain. At that point we'd start paying.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#24Few years ago, I tried to un-squatting an username from both GitLab and GitHub (yes, GitHub were doing this back then), both with success. During the attempt I studied the policies for both service and noticed the difference between the two: For GitHub, they were lean towards not to release the username especially when the account is valid and not "empty"; For GitLab however, they will release the username if the account was inactive (not pushing/posting issues/login etc) for a period of time (See [1]).
[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/support/gitlab-com-policies/#name-s...
That knowledge about GitLab left a weird and confused taste in me. It gives me an impression, that is if a free tier user becomes inactive, they're no longer valuable for GitLab and can be treated as second-tier.
For that reason, I cannot seriously being myself to use GitLab. If you knew that all of your investments will rot to nothing as soon as you stopped paying, you'll probably consider to stop investing it.
Sadly, this idea of removing "dormant" projects followed the same train of logic: If you're not constantly contributing (paying/publising content) to our platform, you're second-tier, and we can just kick you out.
From the previous article where they announced the plan:
> GitLab is aware of the potential for angry opposition to the plan, and will therefore give users weeks or months of warning before deleting their work...
GitLab don't seemed to understand their users well. "Angry opposition" is what might happen if GitHub decides to remove dormant repositories, not GitLab. GitLab users will just feel disappointed and leave (to self-hosting, or maybe host it (back) on GitHub).
GitLab should seriously re-learn what's more important for their service: user engagement or the code hosted on it. Tip: GitLab is not running a social network business.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#25Few years ago, I tried to un-squatting an username from both GitLab and GitHub (yes, GitHub were doing this back then), both with success. During the attempt I studied the policies for both service and noticed the difference between the two: For GitHub, they were lean towards not to release the username especially when the account is valid and not "empty"; For GitLab however, they will release the username if the acc…
Gitlab's approach also sounds like an easy way to hijack dormant projects to inject malicious code and let unsuspecting users download "updates"
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#26I 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…
> 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. We need something like public (book) libraries for code. Or a Library of Congress. FOSS has become critical infrastructure and we need to act like it. Done well, this could also help foster people learning to code. Sure there will be some political issues with it a…
We might just start having a more open landscape where code can roam freely to wherever you want to host it. In other words more than just two full-service providers to choose from who lock you in by network effects and FOMO, made worse because the entire software development tools vendor ecosystem is based on them too.
When it comes to open source and free software projects both of these platforms are not your friends. The "free" services are just an enabler for their revenue models, part of the business plan. Especially Microsoft is well-known for their long game and EEE strategies. If it is up to them we'll move to GOSS, Github Open Source Software, that is so dependent on nice GH services that it can never move away.
I have my hopes in more open technologies, be they low-level like DVCS, or taking care of social aspects of software development, like ActivityPub. On this last bit cool developments are taking place. Extensions to ActivityPub that will allow code forge features to federate with any vendor that supports them. We'll get decentralized software development if that is done well.
Some FOSS projects and communities are taking first strides here. A report of their activities is in this blog post of the Forgefriends project:
https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#27Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't…
Why couldn't you switch to Github or an alternative? You seem to be implying GitLab has something unique that make those others non viable.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#28Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't…
>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now
0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too.
At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30-$40, selfhost something like gitea with drone.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#29I'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…
> 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.
Seems like their new policy wont prohibit that though.
Re: Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash
#30and here I was wondering when people would build a scheduled pipeline job to commit to a repo every month to keep it active, costing them even more money.
bump