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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

#31

Post by nonethewiser »

UpstandingUser wrote: post #8
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…

> 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…

> FOSS has become critical infrastructure and we need to act like it.

Some FOSS has become critical infrastructure. But how much of that has been inactive for a year on gitlab free tier?

I dont see how this threatens critical open source projects.

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

#32

Post by blackoil »

xupybd wrote: post #23

Gitlab 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…

Isn't that what they recently did, when the added a limit of 5 users per namespace or pay 228 USD/year/user if you want more.

I know a company that moved to Github because why add a cost when more popular competitor is giving same for free.

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

#33

Post by pabs3 »

ArrayBoundCheck wrote: post #18
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

There was GitTorrent in 2015:

https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936

There are also multiple git-remote-ipfs projects on GitHub.

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

#34

Post by blackoil »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #12
kyrofa wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IIRC, GitHub always had this limit. They removed it sometime after the acquisition, which could be because they have no pressure to justify the valuation be revenue.

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

#36

Post by xupybd »

nonethewiser wrote: post #27
xupybd wrote: post #23

Gitlab 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.

In our case it wouldn't be worth switching all the pipelines over. It would take a long time for that to pay back the $60 per month.

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

#37

Post by olliej »

UncleEntity wrote: post #17
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 unti…

It doesn’t matter whose definition of dead, the point is that we’re demanding that someone pay to host content in perpetuity for free.

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

#39

Post by ghuntley »

Relevant discussion one month ago

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/366467

“Today we have the SaaS Free User Efficiency - Data Retention Policy in the internal handbook for our team members. legal has requested that we add a full definition for the 'last_activity_at' attribute.”

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