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> So, for users who have integrations with our API this will cause a brief pause in service via our API until the terms have been accepted by signing in to the

• Frost1x 7y ago
  These are the sort of stunts that happen when you relinquish more and more control of your technology and its ownership to external sources that also happen to be for-profit businesses. All hail EaaS (Everything-as-a-Service) models. I entirely agree with you and your sentiments, but I'm not sure why many are even remotely surprised by these sort of escapades. The more dependent you are on an external business for some function and the more that business realizes it, the more they're going to use their leverage against you to their advantage to achieve their goals (not yours). That's exactly what we see happening here. When businesses (or any entities) buy-in to external resources like this, always consider: how much leverage those managing that resource have against you, how critical the function is for you, and how many resources it will take to migrate away from that external resource at a moment's notice if you need to. This is a continuous iterative process that should be going through every developer's head with every design choice, external license, "cloud" service, proprietary internally hosted licenses, etc.
  • BurningFrog 7y ago
    > ....external sources that also happen to be for-profit businesses. Pretty sure a not for profit organization would have even less interest in pleasing their users.
    • ChristianBundy 7y ago
      Maybe, but a cooperatively owned and managed business would have complete interest in its members and their values.
    • emn13 7y ago
      Generally, they do have much more interest in pleasing their users. Not only do not-for-profits typically have some kind of explicit charter, it's usually for some social benefit, like "helping users". If anything; they're too helpful, and won't bash users over the head if they're being truculent, making them slow and crufty. Additionally, not-for-profits do need some kind of revenue (typically), and that tends to come from donors, which are usually... users. If you merely mean free stuff, not literally, not-for-profit... yeah, free but for-profit is pretty much a disaster waiting to happen. Rant: Those business models by and large should probably be hit with the ban-hammer, immediately. Of course, given the complete and utter submission of congress and indeed the very organization of democracy to vested interests, the chance of actually seeing a functioning, efficient market in our lifetimes is essentially nil. It's ironic that traditional communism succumbed perhaps partially due to game-theoretical inherent inefficiencies, and capitalism patted itself on the back without ever really looking in the mirror. So, yay, we get to be the human guinea pigs proving that markets aren't actually intrisincally efficient at all, only efficient within their constraints, which is pretty much worthless given how hard we've collectively been trying to saw the legs out from under this construct. Capitalism is itself one big tragedy of the commons.
      • tarsinge 7y ago
        What bothers me is how screwing users is becoming the new standard. For me trust in society is what enabled first world economies in the first place, instead of business being killed by people constantly looking for ways to screw you. I’m not naive, I own a business, and bad intentioned people exist and you must protect yourself, but assuming the worst in every transaction is not a normal way to think for society. For my experience usually clients trust me, and I want them to succeed with my services, and contracts and lawyers are here only for the worst case. I can’t put my finger on it or express it clearly but free market excuse « dissatisfied users can move, this corporation is responsible only for profit, everyone must lawyer up » don’t look like it’s the good direction for society. I don’t see why free market would be incompatible with an individual sense of responsibility towards society, instead of looking for loopholes to screw people. Maybe it’s a consequence of being global and having not community roots.
    • tinus_hn 7y ago
      What interest do they have other than that?
      • kortilla 7y ago
        Depends, it could be just to disrupt all other competitors on cost and not care how miserable the actual experience is for the customers. Many not for profits exist mainly to stroke the directors’ egos and pay them a fat salary without doing much actual good (e.g. most political non-profits like the Clinton foundation).
  • luc4sdreyer 7y ago
    > but I'm not sure why many are even remotely surprised by these sort of escapades I don't think people are surprised that these things are possible in the context of "EaaS". It's surprising because they're causing massive problems for their users by making the change so quickly. The relative gain of waiting one month before the change wouldn't hurt them that much, but it would help their customers a great deal. So the surprise is seeing how indifferent they seem to the users. (I know they're revising the decision now. Maybe they can avoid most of the bad PR.) The free or partially free dev tool industry is extremely competitive and you need a lot of goodwill to stay alive. They're completely free to screw their users, and their users are completely free (except for some lock-in) to hop to the next provider. I don't understand why they would throw away that goodwill. But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      > But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect. It may be for a lot of users. But some people are GitHub refugees and only started using Gitlab relatively recently. I am one of those, and haven't been using Gitlab for long enough to have any serious friction against moving away from it.
  • heavyset_go 7y ago
    > This is a continuous iterative process that should be going through every developer's head with every design choice, external license, "cloud" service, proprietary internally hosted licenses, etc. The nature of tech trends will ensure that developers never look beyond marketing material that espouses how easy and cool the new shiny tech is. I'm watching developers go all in on serverless as if the generous and copious amounts of free compute that cloud providers are granting on their serverless platforms will always flow like water.
    • JohnFen 7y ago
      > The nature of tech trends will ensure that developers never look beyond marketing material that espouses how easy and cool the new shiny tech is. Not all developers. Some of us have been around the block enough times to be automatically suspicious of marketing material that leans too hard on the "easy and cool" messaging.
  • cryptonector 7y ago
    The profit motive isn't the issue. Even if you don't relinquish control to a VC, you'd still [likely] have a profit motive yourself. The issue isn't profit. You might say the issue is greed, but more importantly, the issue is a lack of regard and compassion for your customers, and a lack of understanding of the danger this puts you in [of losing your customers and, with them, revenue and profit].
    • toomuchtodo 7y ago
      User empathy, if you will.
• skywhopper 7y ago
  Yeah it's bizarre. Why rush it like this? It feels like an artificial internal deadline to roll out the "feature", and they realized it violated the ToS at the last second.
• swebs 7y ago
  I think the purpose is to force users to "agree" to the new terms due to a sense of urgency.
  • cryptonector 7y ago
    So this is an outage then.