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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

#51

Post by abofh »

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

It's not costing them 155M to run hosting. It's maybe a tenth of that. Online business costs are inordinately around people, marketing, and sales acquisitions. Someone wants you to look at X to save money, because Y is more important to them. I don't know gitlab's financing, but it's a pretty common play when someone is looking to boost their figures so someone else won't notice - either for executive payments or acquisition, someone's looking to goose their margins.

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

#53

Post by Aeolun »

fendy3002 wrote: post #47
onion2k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely…

People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server, even if they go to self hosted gitlab which essentially the same. The amount of downtime, sudden server crash, problem with SSL with NAT, setting up gitlab runner, upgrading, etc. You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things

> You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things

Depends on where you are are doing it. AWS makes it ridiculously easy to hand off basically all aspects of hosting. Set up once, use forever.

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

#54

Post by simfree »

fendy3002 wrote: post #47
onion2k wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely…

People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server, even if they go to self hosted gitlab which essentially the same. The amount of downtime, sudden server crash, problem with SSL with NAT, setting up gitlab runner, upgrading, etc. You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things

We've been running Gitlab for over half a decade with over 100 repos, runners on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimal need for maintenance.

Same story for the primary free software project we rely on (who we have a support contract with). Neither us nor them spend anywhere close to 10 hours a year on maintaining selfhosted Gitlab related infrastructure.

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

#55

Post by rob74 »

xupybd wrote: post #42
TheChaplain wrote: post #40

I love GitLab and would like to support them, men $19 is just way too much for a solo dev. If they had a $5 for a "Pro"-tier I'd go for it.

I second that. I could probably convince my manager to pay $5 per person even if we get no extra features. It's too hard a sell for $19. I think they could do a lot to milk their current free tier users. We buy compute time periodically and that is a small amount I guess. We happily pay Bitbucket for our backup storage. I'm sure we'd pay for our code storage if that was required.

> I think they could do a lot to milk their current free tier users.

Maybe $5/person/month is not a lot for active projects a business relies upon, but the 90% of hobby and (semi-) dormant projects would be deleted or moved to GitHub if Gitlab tried to ask money for them. Which would reduce the attractivity of the platform.

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

#56

Post by bigpeopleareold »

I think what they were trying to plan is fine. Maybe offering free repos is a loss leader in competition to the likes of GitHub, but useful services should have a direct cost attached to it.

I have a bunch of repos on there I haven't touched for years I was thinking of archiving them on my home server instead and maybe setup cgit or something for a web interface if it mattered. I don't really need 80% of GitLab features (or GitHub for that matter). It might be nice if someone sees it because of the navigability of these platforms and the visibility it affords. However, that hasn't happened. If they are saying that it has a cost, I can might as well self-host it for myself ... or not.

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

#57

Post by boomlinde »

pabs3 wrote: post #35

I feel like decentralised storage for git repositories needs a comeback. Has anyone tried out GitTorrent or git-remote-ipfs or similar?

IMO Git is already quite resilient to this kind of breakdown. Even if your host shuts down, everyone who has a clone has the development history and can become the host, continue with another host, accept patches over email...or patches on paper napkins.

The main problem with services like GitLab is that they are not only hosts to repositories. They're issue trackers, they're CI/CD platforms, they're release artifact hosts, they're discussion platforms, they're review platforms, they're their own bespoke pull/merge request workflow; all eggs in one basket "as a service". If they shut down your repo, the code is the last thing to worry about unless they have the only copy of the current canonical history.

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

#59

Post by azinman2 »

onion2k wrote: post #45
malikNF wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely…

Don’t forget backups, testing to make sure they work, etc

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

#60

Post by nicce »

nonethewiser wrote: post #29
eslaught wrote: post #15

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…

> 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.

It does since if you don’t touch the project aka it is dormant, it disappears. And nobody can know its existence and find it useful.
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