Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by ddevault » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

oorza wrote: post #98

ddevault wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you believe that it's important for free software to use free software infrastructure (and you should[0]), then there is no choice but to do so. Infrastructure like GitHub is primarily a function of network effects and the only way to overcome them is to cast your lot appropriately. A maintainer who "doesn't care" if their infrastructure is proprietary is not doing a good job. [0]: https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/…

Seems an awful lot like perfection being the enemy of good. Github is and always has been a closed platform. It's also responsible for the largest explosion of open source activity from any single source in the last twenty years. Your argument relies on the assumption that the cost of migrating away from Github is a cost a FOSS project can pay and survive, which is a pretty heavy assumption as far as those things go.…

Many projects, some of them among the most successful projects in the world (Linux, PostgreSQL, Debian, others), are not on GitHub and are doing just fine. I reject the axiomatic statement that projects cannot survive outside of GitHub -- it's plainly ridiculous and trivially disproven. Thousands of successful projects do. Arguing otherwise contradicts the facts and serves only to justify the status quo.

Many people write FOSS for many different reasons. Chasing popularity is among the worst, and using GitHub is a poor way of achieving it regardless.

GitHub is not good enough. Placing all of our FOSS eggs in a proprietary basket which is incompatible with FOSS values is an absolutely foolish thing to do. The alternatives exist and are equal to the task, if not exceptional.

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

#122

Post by bArray » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

ddevault wrote: post #85

bArray wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A maintainer who "doesn't care" if their infrastructure is proprietary is not doing a good job. This isn't to mention also the issues regarding code ownership, where GitHub now trains their Co-Pilot AI on code under any license. > Note that GitLab is not really the answer to this problem. It's open core, subservient to its investors, and pulls a lot of stupid shit like this. Even if GitLab pulled out on their payed…

1: We are working on a web tool which uses emails under the hood but is otherwise quite similar to pull/merge requests. We have already rolled out the contributor side of the process, which you can see demoed here: https://spacepub.space/w/no6jnhHeUrt2E5ST168tRL 2: TBD, but we will consult with the community before making any final calls. There will be at least 90 days notice before any pricing changes once the long-…

Appreciated, thanks.

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

#123

Post by will-bradley » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 10:24 PM UTC

benjymo wrote: post #80

shizzy0 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a paying GitHub customer, but they had such a crummy private repo policy at the time (I think only 5 private repos were allowed) it forced me to make poor technical decisions: "I'll delete this github repo, keep my local copy, to open up a slot." I switched all my private repos to gitlab and stopped paying for github and was happier for it. Later github changed its policy to something saner, but I never switche…

I'm doing the same for the 5 user limit on GitLab currently. But the pricing is just too steep for me to justify setting up, e.g. an extra user for some automated tasks.

You shouldn't need a user account for automated tasks, that's what webhooks and deploy keys are for.

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

#124

Post by nirui » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

Ironlikebike wrote: post #111

nirui wrote: post #24

Few 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…

"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." GitLab has an explicit program for approved Open Source projects: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... This is their philanthropic effort. They need to remain financially solvent…

I do understand that they need pay for their running cost, but to be completely honest, I don't think that they're running the business in a smart way.

When GitHub took off, they were not offering private repository at all. Instead, they added it in slowly when they can afford to do so. This is one of the reason why GitHub has now become the #1 platform for open source projects around the world.

GitLab is trying a different approach by focusing on offering repository hosting as service, but as time progresses and GitHub grows, this business model became less and less attractive. As a result of it, now days GitLab mainly attracts people who thinks GitHub isn't the right option for them, and that's not a big market. No matter how many cost they cut, if this remain unchanged, GitLab is already on it's dead bed (by that, I mean stop growing, not close for business).

GitHub is smart because at very beginning (before allowing private repositories), they knew that if they want to attract good programmers and projects, they must also accept and respect garbage, because that's what it takes to build their trust.

Deleting user data however, always destroy trust. If storing those repositories creates unbearable cost for GitLab, then maybe introduce a reasonable cap and then rejects new commits once the cap is exceeded (while asking user to buy more spaces). Making the entire repository just disappear is too much.

I'm glad that they did not end up choosing that route, but at the same time, not choosing that route should be the default, not something you just realized after it went to the media.

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

#125

Post by Accujack » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:49 AM UTC

arrow7000 wrote: post #118

Accujack wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm sure that wasn't what they were looking for and their monthly bill is big ( perhaps too big ), but setting fire to the whole thing isn't the right move. It's owned by Microsoft, a for-profit company with a long history of hostility toward open source anything. Literally setting fire to the building and servers IS the right move if it's what brings the most money in the door and keeps as little as possible from g…

This is about GitLab, not GitHub. GitLab is not owned by Microsoft.

My bad. Same applies to any for profit corporation, however.

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

#126

Post by dizhn » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:22 AM UTC

pooper wrote: post #78

linspace wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server People underestimate consistently how complicated is to build reliable things, hardware or software. There is a world between "it works for me" and "it works for all"

And dysfunctional organizations. I worked as a contractor at one place where we simply used the shared file server as a git remote. Reasoning was if the file server was down, it would come back up quickly because it affects everyone. I didn't understand this reasoning until I got emails from the database team saying the database servers stopped working and every development team now needs to change their connection s…

Full DNS propagation used to easily take up to two days back in the day. It might be that.

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

#127

Post by clintonb » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

will-bradley wrote: post #123

benjymo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm doing the same for the 5 user limit on GitLab currently. But the pricing is just too steep for me to justify setting up, e.g. an extra user for some automated tasks.

You shouldn't need a user account for automated tasks, that's what webhooks and deploy keys are for.

I don’t know if this issue has been resolved, but as late as four years ago, GitLab didn’t have a notion of a service user. If you wanted a server to authenticate and pull from a private repo, you had to use a licensed account to do so. This meant your 5 user tier became a 4 user tier.

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

#128

Post by voffk » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 3:20 PM UTC

clintonb wrote: post #127

will-bradley wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't need a user account for automated tasks, that's what webhooks and deploy keys are for.

I don’t know if this issue has been resolved, but as late as four years ago, GitLab didn’t have a notion of a service user. If you wanted a server to authenticate and pull from a private repo, you had to use a licensed account to do so. This meant your 5 user tier became a 4 user tier.

Project access tokens (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...) is what you need and they have been around for 2+ years

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

#129

Post by semiquaver » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

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... )

https://ir.gitlab.com/node/7446/pdf

They burned $129MM and forecast a loss of $142MM next fiscal year.

Given that they recently went public I’d imagine they would be trying to become profitable. The IPO appears to have netted them around $600M in cash, or about four years of runway.

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

#130

Post by hakfoo » Sun, Aug 07, 2022, 1:11 AM UTC

I have a few personal projects on Gitlab. Mostly I use them because my employer uses the self-hosted version. Their products are propriatery and probably need to be stored internally for compliance reasons. I thought the self-hosted product was their USP-- believed it enough to buy a few hundred bucks of GTLB shares (-40% :sigh:)

The most successful of my projects has a potential audience of a few hundred users-- custom firmware for specific obscure hardware. The others, the likely user base is likely one.

I suspect that's what a lot of hobbyist projects are going to be-- an itch scratched for a single user and/or a very small community, perhaps cast into the void with the thought "someone else might find some value in it" or "this helps as a portfolio for future job interviews-- lets me showcase technologies I don't work on 40 hours a week"

The thing is, this means that there's a fair chance you're going to reach endgame. You don't need any more features because your itch is scratched. There will be no new commits, but it's nice to have the archive for when someone actually needs the code. So activity is an awful proxy for value here.