10 ms·

Gitlab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

218 points by lamontcg 4y ago

richbell 4y ago
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.
- bevelwork 4y ago
  Looks to be about 250M/year [source](https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2022-03-14-gitlab-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-fiscal-2022-financial-results.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2022-03-14-gitlab-re...)
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That's revenue. They're spending more money than they're making.
  - judge2020 4y ago
    While they have 884M cash/equivalents, they did have a yearly 157M Net loss, compared to 192M net loss last year. That's some good improvement but it means there's a lot of work to be done before they reach profitability. So I don't think they're strapped for cash, but there is likely pressure to make enough changes to reach profitability within 3-4 years.
  - semiquaver 4y ago
    https://ir.gitlab.com/node/7446/pdf 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.
- kyrofa 4y ago
  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/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
  - xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
    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?
    - blackoil 4y ago
      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.
- gloryjulio 4y ago
  - crgwbr 4y ago
    GitHub is owned by MS, not gitlab.
  - birger 4y ago
    That is GitHub. This is about GitLab.
    - gloryjulio 4y ago
      Yeah my mistake. Read it wrong
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Is the title really accurate though. They never made a public announcement saying they would do this. Someone just leaked an internal discussion and it blew up. A lot of things get discussed and evaluated that never eventuate.
  - simonw 4y ago
    The code they wrote for doing this has been public all along: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689
    - OmegaDungeon 4y ago
      This is the first time I'm seeing this merge request, no one reporting on this even mentioned it.
olliej 4y ago
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 that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense.
- olliej 4y ago
  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
  - snoopy_telex 4y ago
    https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention... says "Hopes to save a quarter of hosting costs by binning repos that haven't been touched for a year", so perhaps it's from looking at cost centers more then just the company wide costs.
  - abofh 4y ago
    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.
- kelnos 4y ago
  > it does seem kind of shitty that 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. This is a really great insight that I hadn't thought of. Sure, if they, from the start, had promised to do so, that would be one thing. But users of free plans are essentially freeloading (sure, there are useful network effects of having free users on the platform), and it's a bit entitled to expect that free services are free in perpetuity (especially from a company that isn't profitable), even for projects that might be abandoned.
snoopy_telex 4y ago
and 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.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  bump
- maxloh 4y ago
  That is clever.
- majewsky 4y ago
  This comment chain has not received any replies in the last 4 hours and is therefore now marked as stale. Reply with "!stale no" to remove the flag, otherwise the comment chain will be deleted in 8 hours.
eslaught 4y ago
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 maintainers to have to do a song and dance to keep them around. Yes, there's a cost, but there's a benefit too, and I hope these hosts of the open source community remember that.
- andrew_ 4y ago
  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.
  - blagie 4y ago
    I have a lot of projects from >10 years ago which are mature, stable, used, and the only time they see active development is if there's a breaking change elsewhere (a lot of them interact with other tools). I also have some amount of open science stuff. I count on github / gitlab being archival for things like archiving how I process data in some piece of research. Literally all I really need of a git host is to support the git protocol, and to keep stuff around for me forever. I appreciate having pull requests, conversations, and what-not, but the #1 requirement is having my stuff there, reliably stored, and available to the world. I'll mention: I don't blame gitlab for a decision they didn't make. If you've ever worked in a corporation, you'll know a lot of stupid decisions ALMOST get made all the time. gitlab tends to be more open than other organizations, so we see the inner workings. I've always seen them pull back when a decision is particularly numbskull.
  - Bluecobra 4y ago
    I use this small utility in Linux called mdump to test multicast on a semi regular basis. It does what it is supposed to and I never ran into any issues. I just happened to look at the source code again the other day and it was last updated in 1994!
xupybd 4y ago
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 be able to keep developing our software without deploying infrastructure we have to maintain. At that point we'd start paying.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  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.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    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.
- malikNF 4y ago
  >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.
  - xupybd 4y ago
    Yes you could but that is a shift in responsibility. At that point we are responsible for keeping that infrastructure running. Any failure ties up internal resources. At the scale of 1 developer and 2 freelancers it doesn't make so much sense. There are far more valuable things we can do for the business than remove that $60 USD cost.
nirui 4y ago
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 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-squatting-policy 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.
- trinovantes 4y ago
  Gitlab's approach also sounds like an easy way to hijack dormant projects to inject malicious code and let unsuspecting users download "updates"
  - L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago
    Except that projects are namespaced under their owner, so you'd need to hijack the owner's account. They don't appear to have been proposing deleting users (or groups), just projects. Other than that, you can fork whatever you want today...
pabs3 4y ago
I feel like decentralised storage for git repositories needs a comeback. Has anyone tried out GitTorrent or git-remote-ipfs or similar?
- thinkmassive 4y ago
  Federation is under development by some smaller git server projects, like Gitea. It should provide a good middle ground on the spectrum of decentralization. Check out progress at the latest Forge Friends monthly report: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/07/17/2022-07-report/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/07/17/2022-07-report/
- boomlinde 4y ago
  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.
ghuntley 4y ago
Relevant discussion one month ago https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/366467 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.”
TheChaplain 4y ago
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.
- xupybd 4y ago
  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.
  - rob74 4y ago
    > 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.
- tanepiper 4y ago
  Yes, GitHub is $4 a month for Pro and it does give some additional features (mostly more Action minutes and protected branches) GitLab has nothing to compete against that.
  - berryton 4y ago
    This is the right mindset. Instead of arguing "we need to cut costs", why don't they work on an entry-level paid tier? Seriously, it is like they're not even trying to compete with GH at this level.
- Macha 4y ago
  Yeah, this had been the case for me. Throw in a feature like epics or roadmaps and some CI time for $5/mo and I would have been on it, but $20/mo is too much for how few of the premium features I'd use. I'd just always assumed this tier didn't exist because the opportunity lost with long tail consumers was weighed up against the possible of business users downgrading to a lower tier. But then they could just go with the jetbrains model, and have the exact same tier have two different prices depending on whether the buyer is an individual or a business, if they're worried about that. Call it Gitlab Premium Personal or something. That said, the youtube-dl github drama did push me into self hosting my private projects and mirrors of at-risk projects on Gitea, so that window has closed now. Also Gitea is a lot nicer than Gogs was the previous time I compared gitlab against other options. But gitlab is still for now my host for public projects.
agilob 4y ago
When Google Code was closing, GitLab had a project to support quick migration from GC to GL. Most of the projects I copied were dormant for years, and then someone forked some of them months later and worked on them.
bigpeopleareold 4y ago
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.
ptman 4y ago
Selfhost https://gitea.io https://gitea.io . You can get free server resources https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ but keep backups in case they decide to get rid of free stuff like gitlab =P
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
What’s the difference between a project that’s “dormant”, and one that’s “done”?
- meltedcapacitor 4y ago
  "done" has downloads?
foxbee 4y ago
I understand their intentions for doing this - i don't agree with them. My initial reaction was 'sleep mode' may be better and alert people to either log in and "activate" their repo. Once again, i don't agree with deleting dormant projects, I'm just curious what an alternative solution is?
- bmitc 4y ago
  Is saving static data really a huge cost sink for them? Seems kind of weird to have a business model of storing and handling highly dynamic data only to come down hard on the easiest use case of the product.
- fariszr 4y ago
  > My initial reaction was 'sleep mode' may be better and alert people to either log in and "activate" their repo. That's what they ended up deciding to do > We reached a decision to move unused repos to object storage. Once implemented, they will still be accessible but take a bit longer to access after a long period of inactivity.
mro_name 4y ago
a peer-based possibility to search in code. That's direly needed. Currently all takes on such are centralised, be it Microsoft's github, gitlab, STOF whatnot. I once thought DOAP might be a thing, but a search engine bringing up code results (needs not be constrained to it) would be really nice. Problem: funding. Maybe like this https://nlnet.nl/project/Gitea/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Gitea/
yieldcrv 4y ago
can we just normalize software being done and finished? there are plenty of things that don't require dependencies and don't encounter breaking changes. the javascript community's problems, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders don't represent software development.
rcarmo 4y ago
Well, for a moment there I thought we had another Google Code on our hands. I’m all for having multiple providers and such, but every time I find a really useful project on Gitlab I mirror it to my home Gitea instance lest it vanish.
obert 4y ago
Suggestion to GitLab: compromise with “if you paid at least once any of our services, your repos will remain up forever for free as long as we exist.”
lol768 4y ago
There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice for OSS. There may have been reasons to do this in the past (e.g. lack of integrated CI) but I'm not convinced those arguments really hold anymore in 2022. If you're a maintainer and prioritising interoperability and the lowest barrier to entry for potential contributors and you don't care about it being proprietary/owned by MSFT you pick GitHub. If you're prioritising a FOSS stack, good tooling offering and low-weight pages with excellent performance, you pick something like SourceHut. For everyone reliant on software published by maintainers who have already made this decision historically, it's reassuring the right decision has been made here, but a bit worrying they were needing to consider a step this far in the first place. Combined with their poor pay for engineers (discussed to death here on HN already), it does make you think a bit about their finances.
- ddevault 4y ago
  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/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras... 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. If you want the GitHub-style workflow and UI, go with Codeberg or another Gitea instance.
  - bArray 4y ago
    > 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-tiers now, it's too late. This has been coming for years with the paid version of GitLab features vs the free version, which always ran behind on functionality. We are currently considering our options to move away from GitLab. Ideally we look for tickets, merge/pull requests, CI and the ability to allow the public to contribute. @ddevault We have been looking at SourceHut at an alternative. Specifically some questions for you: 1. Will you have a non-email merge/patch system for SourceHut in the near future [1]? The problem isn't so much for our team, but to encourage external people to help with our project who are used to the likes of GitHub and GitLab. 2. With regards to pricing for SourceHut, how will the pricing look in the future [2]? We have a small project that could pay per person/group, but would struggle to pay what GitLab are asking [3]. GitHib pricing is better, but obviously your code then becomes the product. Great work in any case, I really enjoy seeing your blog updates. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/25/Code-review-with-aerc.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/25/Code-review-with-aerc.htm... [2] https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ [3] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
rascul 4y ago
Give me a plan that costs no more than $5/month and you can get some money out of me. I'm not going to pay $19/month.
PedroBatista 4y ago
Regardless of reasons ( I'm sure there are some good ones ), this was a "small" mistake that reveals a lot. I don't know if the people running Gitlab are dev/ops guys who found themselves running the ship or some high pedigree managers but this reveals an enormous blind spot on this group of people. One of the major driving forces for humans is loss aversion. Doesn't matter the project is abandoned or some garbage you don't value, these guys are on the business of banking for code + services and they just announced to the world they can't be trusted as bankers. 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.
- Accujack 4y ago
  >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 going out. They don't and never will care about customer goodwill for something like their paid service, they'd stop offering it tomorrow if it made money for them.
  - arrow7000 4y ago
    This is about GitLab, not GitHub. GitLab is not owned by Microsoft.
    - Accujack 4y ago
      My bad. Same applies to any for profit corporation, however.
berryton 4y ago
Since some comments are talking about alternatives, I'll leave this here: https://github.com/theonedev/onedev https://github.com/theonedev/onedev I found out about it on a previous HN thread. It can do automation, one of the missing points from Gitea.
Proven 4y ago
hakfoo 4y ago
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.

218 points by lamontcg 4y ago

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.

bevelwork 4y ago
Looks to be about 250M/year [source](https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2022-03-14-gitlab-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-fiscal-2022-financial-results.html https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2022-03-14-gitlab-re...)
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That's revenue. They're spending more money than they're making.
- judge2020 4y ago
  While they have 884M cash/equivalents, they did have a yearly 157M Net loss, compared to 192M net loss last year. That's some good improvement but it means there's a lot of work to be done before they reach profitability. So I don't think they're strapped for cash, but there is likely pressure to make enough changes to reach profitability within 3-4 years.
- semiquaver 4y ago
  https://ir.gitlab.com/node/7446/pdf 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.
kyrofa 4y ago
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/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
- xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
  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?
  - blackoil 4y ago
    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.
gloryjulio 4y ago
- crgwbr 4y ago
  GitHub is owned by MS, not gitlab.
- birger 4y ago
  That is GitHub. This is about GitLab.
  - gloryjulio 4y ago
    Yeah my mistake. Read it wrong
Gigachad 4y ago
Is the title really accurate though. They never made a public announcement saying they would do this. Someone just leaked an internal discussion and it blew up. A lot of things get discussed and evaluated that never eventuate.
- simonw 4y ago
  The code they wrote for doing this has been public all along: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/merge_requests/85689
  - OmegaDungeon 4y ago
    This is the first time I'm seeing this merge request, no one reporting on this even mentioned it.

olliej 4y ago

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 that they should be required to host it forever at their own expense.

olliej 4y ago
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
- snoopy_telex 4y ago
  https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention... says "Hopes to save a quarter of hosting costs by binning repos that haven't been touched for a year", so perhaps it's from looking at cost centers more then just the company wide costs.
- abofh 4y ago
  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.
kelnos 4y ago
> it does seem kind of shitty that 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. This is a really great insight that I hadn't thought of. Sure, if they, from the start, had promised to do so, that would be one thing. But users of free plans are essentially freeloading (sure, there are useful network effects of having free users on the platform), and it's a bit entitled to expect that free services are free in perpetuity (especially from a company that isn't profitable), even for projects that might be abandoned.

snoopy_telex 4y ago

and 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.

nonethewiser 4y ago
bump
maxloh 4y ago
That is clever.
majewsky 4y ago
This comment chain has not received any replies in the last 4 hours and is therefore now marked as stale. Reply with "!stale no" to remove the flag, otherwise the comment chain will be deleted in 8 hours.

eslaught 4y ago

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 maintainers to have to do a song and dance to keep them around. Yes, there's a cost, but there's a benefit too, and I hope these hosts of the open source community remember that.

andrew_ 4y ago
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.
- blagie 4y ago
  I have a lot of projects from >10 years ago which are mature, stable, used, and the only time they see active development is if there's a breaking change elsewhere (a lot of them interact with other tools). I also have some amount of open science stuff. I count on github / gitlab being archival for things like archiving how I process data in some piece of research. Literally all I really need of a git host is to support the git protocol, and to keep stuff around for me forever. I appreciate having pull requests, conversations, and what-not, but the #1 requirement is having my stuff there, reliably stored, and available to the world. I'll mention: I don't blame gitlab for a decision they didn't make. If you've ever worked in a corporation, you'll know a lot of stupid decisions ALMOST get made all the time. gitlab tends to be more open than other organizations, so we see the inner workings. I've always seen them pull back when a decision is particularly numbskull.
- Bluecobra 4y ago
  I use this small utility in Linux called mdump to test multicast on a semi regular basis. It does what it is supposed to and I never ran into any issues. I just happened to look at the source code again the other day and it was last updated in 1994!

xupybd 4y ago

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 be able to keep developing our software without deploying infrastructure we have to maintain. At that point we'd start paying.

nonethewiser 4y ago
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.
- xupybd 4y ago
  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.
malikNF 4y ago
>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.
- xupybd 4y ago
  Yes you could but that is a shift in responsibility. At that point we are responsible for keeping that infrastructure running. Any failure ties up internal resources. At the scale of 1 developer and 2 freelancers it doesn't make so much sense. There are far more valuable things we can do for the business than remove that $60 USD cost.

nirui 4y ago

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 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-squatting-policy 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.

trinovantes 4y ago
Gitlab's approach also sounds like an easy way to hijack dormant projects to inject malicious code and let unsuspecting users download "updates"
- L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago
  Except that projects are namespaced under their owner, so you'd need to hijack the owner's account. They don't appear to have been proposing deleting users (or groups), just projects. Other than that, you can fork whatever you want today...

pabs3 4y ago

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

thinkmassive 4y ago
Federation is under development by some smaller git server projects, like Gitea. It should provide a good middle ground on the spectrum of decentralization. Check out progress at the latest Forge Friends monthly report: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/07/17/2022-07-report/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/07/17/2022-07-report/
boomlinde 4y ago
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.

ghuntley 4y ago

Relevant discussion one month ago https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/366467 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.”

TheChaplain 4y ago

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.

xupybd 4y ago
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.
- rob74 4y ago
  > 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.
tanepiper 4y ago
Yes, GitHub is $4 a month for Pro and it does give some additional features (mostly more Action minutes and protected branches) GitLab has nothing to compete against that.
- berryton 4y ago
  This is the right mindset. Instead of arguing "we need to cut costs", why don't they work on an entry-level paid tier? Seriously, it is like they're not even trying to compete with GH at this level.
Macha 4y ago
Yeah, this had been the case for me. Throw in a feature like epics or roadmaps and some CI time for $5/mo and I would have been on it, but $20/mo is too much for how few of the premium features I'd use. I'd just always assumed this tier didn't exist because the opportunity lost with long tail consumers was weighed up against the possible of business users downgrading to a lower tier. But then they could just go with the jetbrains model, and have the exact same tier have two different prices depending on whether the buyer is an individual or a business, if they're worried about that. Call it Gitlab Premium Personal or something. That said, the youtube-dl github drama did push me into self hosting my private projects and mirrors of at-risk projects on Gitea, so that window has closed now. Also Gitea is a lot nicer than Gogs was the previous time I compared gitlab against other options. But gitlab is still for now my host for public projects.

agilob 4y ago

When Google Code was closing, GitLab had a project to support quick migration from GC to GL. Most of the projects I copied were dormant for years, and then someone forked some of them months later and worked on them.

bigpeopleareold 4y ago

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.

ptman 4y ago

Selfhost https://gitea.io https://gitea.io . You can get free server resources https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ https://paul.totterman.name/posts/free-clouds/ but keep backups in case they decide to get rid of free stuff like gitlab =P

aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago

What’s the difference between a project that’s “dormant”, and one that’s “done”?

meltedcapacitor 4y ago
"done" has downloads?

foxbee 4y ago

I understand their intentions for doing this - i don't agree with them. My initial reaction was 'sleep mode' may be better and alert people to either log in and "activate" their repo. Once again, i don't agree with deleting dormant projects, I'm just curious what an alternative solution is?

bmitc 4y ago
Is saving static data really a huge cost sink for them? Seems kind of weird to have a business model of storing and handling highly dynamic data only to come down hard on the easiest use case of the product.
fariszr 4y ago
> My initial reaction was 'sleep mode' may be better and alert people to either log in and "activate" their repo. That's what they ended up deciding to do > We reached a decision to move unused repos to object storage. Once implemented, they will still be accessible but take a bit longer to access after a long period of inactivity.

mro_name 4y ago

a peer-based possibility to search in code. That's direly needed. Currently all takes on such are centralised, be it Microsoft's github, gitlab, STOF whatnot. I once thought DOAP might be a thing, but a search engine bringing up code results (needs not be constrained to it) would be really nice. Problem: funding. Maybe like this https://nlnet.nl/project/Gitea/ https://nlnet.nl/project/Gitea/

yieldcrv 4y ago

can we just normalize software being done and finished? there are plenty of things that don't require dependencies and don't encounter breaking changes. the javascript community's problems, attention deficit and hyperactivity disorders don't represent software development.

rcarmo 4y ago

Well, for a moment there I thought we had another Google Code on our hands. I’m all for having multiple providers and such, but every time I find a really useful project on Gitlab I mirror it to my home Gitea instance lest it vanish.

obert 4y ago

Suggestion to GitLab: compromise with “if you paid at least once any of our services, your repos will remain up forever for free as long as we exist.”

lol768 4y ago

There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice for OSS. There may have been reasons to do this in the past (e.g. lack of integrated CI) but I'm not convinced those arguments really hold anymore in 2022. If you're a maintainer and prioritising interoperability and the lowest barrier to entry for potential contributors and you don't care about it being proprietary/owned by MSFT you pick GitHub. If you're prioritising a FOSS stack, good tooling offering and low-weight pages with excellent performance, you pick something like SourceHut. For everyone reliant on software published by maintainers who have already made this decision historically, it's reassuring the right decision has been made here, but a bit worrying they were needing to consider a step this far in the first place. Combined with their poor pay for engineers (discussed to death here on HN already), it does make you think a bit about their finances.

ddevault 4y ago
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/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras... 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. If you want the GitHub-style workflow and UI, go with Codeberg or another Gitea instance.
- bArray 4y ago
  > 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-tiers now, it's too late. This has been coming for years with the paid version of GitLab features vs the free version, which always ran behind on functionality. We are currently considering our options to move away from GitLab. Ideally we look for tickets, merge/pull requests, CI and the ability to allow the public to contribute. @ddevault We have been looking at SourceHut at an alternative. Specifically some questions for you: 1. Will you have a non-email merge/patch system for SourceHut in the near future [1]? The problem isn't so much for our team, but to encourage external people to help with our project who are used to the likes of GitHub and GitLab. 2. With regards to pricing for SourceHut, how will the pricing look in the future [2]? We have a small project that could pay per person/group, but would struggle to pay what GitLab are asking [3]. GitHib pricing is better, but obviously your code then becomes the product. Great work in any case, I really enjoy seeing your blog updates. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/25/Code-review-with-aerc.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/07/25/Code-review-with-aerc.htm... [2] https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ https://sourcehut.org/pricing/ [3] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

rascul 4y ago

Give me a plan that costs no more than $5/month and you can get some money out of me. I'm not going to pay $19/month.

PedroBatista 4y ago

Regardless of reasons ( I'm sure there are some good ones ), this was a "small" mistake that reveals a lot. I don't know if the people running Gitlab are dev/ops guys who found themselves running the ship or some high pedigree managers but this reveals an enormous blind spot on this group of people. One of the major driving forces for humans is loss aversion. Doesn't matter the project is abandoned or some garbage you don't value, these guys are on the business of banking for code + services and they just announced to the world they can't be trusted as bankers. 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.

Accujack 4y ago
>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 going out. They don't and never will care about customer goodwill for something like their paid service, they'd stop offering it tomorrow if it made money for them.
- arrow7000 4y ago
  This is about GitLab, not GitHub. GitLab is not owned by Microsoft.
  - Accujack 4y ago
    My bad. Same applies to any for profit corporation, however.

berryton 4y ago

Since some comments are talking about alternatives, I'll leave this here: https://github.com/theonedev/onedev https://github.com/theonedev/onedev I found out about it on a previous HN thread. It can do automation, one of the missing points from Gitea.

Proven 4y ago

hakfoo 4y ago

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.