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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 annua

by 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.
- eslaught 4y ago
  The thing is, policies like this make it really hard to manage open source projects, which (a) typically do not make a lot of money, and (b) in the very long tail, are sometimes "dormant" according to this metric. And the cost goes up the more projects you have and the more services they're spread over. If they really wanted to save only on costs, surely they could have gone for the biggest repos first? E.g., politely email owners of large-but-inactive repos to consider spinning them down, and then if that fails to move the needle, then put in a policy (starting with big repos first). There's no reason for someone's 1k LOC project to get swept up in something like this. The costs for that must be trivial.
- bredren 4y ago
  There was a time when sentiment was very against GitHub. Iirc, it was when prices went up before Microsoft acquired the company. GitLab dined on that, and really any time negative press has come from GitHub. I don’t think people would have been pushed the move it to GitLab narrative If they had foreseen this.
UpstandingUser 4y ago
> 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 around funding and what code we should or shouldn't host, but the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks I think. I've seen tax money go to worse things, at least.
- rapnie 4y ago
  We might just start having a more open landscape where code can roam freely to wherever you want to host it. In other words more than just two full-service providers to choose from who lock you in by network effects and FOMO, made worse because the entire software development tools vendor ecosystem is based on them too. When it comes to open source and free software projects both of these platforms are not your friends. The "free" services are just an enabler for their revenue models, part of the business plan. Especially Microsoft is well-known for their long game and EEE strategies. If it is up to them we'll move to GOSS, Github Open Source Software, that is so dependent on nice GH services that it can never move away. I have my hopes in more open technologies, be they low-level like DVCS, or taking care of social aspects of software development, like ActivityPub. On this last bit cool developments are taking place. Extensions to ActivityPub that will allow code forge features to federate with any vendor that supports them. We'll get decentralized software development if that is done well. Some FOSS projects and communities are taking first strides here. A report of their activities is in this blog post of the Forgefriends project: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge-federation/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  > 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.
- 4y ago
UncleEntity 4y ago
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 until the next python version bump. I honestly don’t think anyone else has used it, its a python wrapper around boost:: property_tree which I use to transform rss xml to json, but it does contains a lot of magic to do things using the python C-API which are pretty hard to figure out because there’s no documentation so I think the real value is having examples to look at. I spent many wasted hours figuring out how these things worked by reading other peoples code and adding them in the easiest way possible. Might someday save someone a bit of time…maybe.
- olliej 4y ago
  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.
ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago
I'm still wondering why there isn't a bittorrent for git
- pabs3 4y ago
  There was GitTorrent in 2015: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936 There are also multiple git-remote-ipfs projects on GitHub.
- mdaniel 4y ago
  In some sense, this has the same problem as TFA: who is going to seed those disused repos (same problem with ipfs linked in the sibling comment, which one can pay a "pinning node" but pay)
Gigachad 4y ago
Gitlab projects are way bigger than you’d expect. The actual git repo is usually not the biggest part. It’s the build artefacts and docker images. The average project I have worked with on Gitlab has been in the tens of gigabytes while active repos like the gitlab itself repo are in the terabytes.

by olliej 4y ago

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.

eslaught 4y ago
The thing is, policies like this make it really hard to manage open source projects, which (a) typically do not make a lot of money, and (b) in the very long tail, are sometimes "dormant" according to this metric. And the cost goes up the more projects you have and the more services they're spread over. If they really wanted to save only on costs, surely they could have gone for the biggest repos first? E.g., politely email owners of large-but-inactive repos to consider spinning them down, and then if that fails to move the needle, then put in a policy (starting with big repos first). There's no reason for someone's 1k LOC project to get swept up in something like this. The costs for that must be trivial.
bredren 4y ago
There was a time when sentiment was very against GitHub. Iirc, it was when prices went up before Microsoft acquired the company. GitLab dined on that, and really any time negative press has come from GitHub. I don’t think people would have been pushed the move it to GitLab narrative If they had foreseen this.

UpstandingUser 4y ago

> 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 around funding and what code we should or shouldn't host, but the benefits would outweigh the drawbacks I think. I've seen tax money go to worse things, at least.

rapnie 4y ago
We might just start having a more open landscape where code can roam freely to wherever you want to host it. In other words more than just two full-service providers to choose from who lock you in by network effects and FOMO, made worse because the entire software development tools vendor ecosystem is based on them too. When it comes to open source and free software projects both of these platforms are not your friends. The "free" services are just an enabler for their revenue models, part of the business plan. Especially Microsoft is well-known for their long game and EEE strategies. If it is up to them we'll move to GOSS, Github Open Source Software, that is so dependent on nice GH services that it can never move away. I have my hopes in more open technologies, be they low-level like DVCS, or taking care of social aspects of software development, like ActivityPub. On this last bit cool developments are taking place. Extensions to ActivityPub that will allow code forge features to federate with any vendor that supports them. We'll get decentralized software development if that is done well. Some FOSS projects and communities are taking first strides here. A report of their activities is in this blog post of the Forgefriends project: https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge-federation/ https://forgefriends.org/blog/2022/06/30/2022-06-state-forge...
nonethewiser 4y ago
> 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.
4y ago

UncleEntity 4y ago

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 until the next python version bump. I honestly don’t think anyone else has used it, its a python wrapper around boost:: property_tree which I use to transform rss xml to json, but it does contains a lot of magic to do things using the python C-API which are pretty hard to figure out because there’s no documentation so I think the real value is having examples to look at. I spent many wasted hours figuring out how these things worked by reading other peoples code and adding them in the easiest way possible. Might someday save someone a bit of time…maybe.

olliej 4y ago
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.

ArrayBoundCheck 4y ago

I'm still wondering why there isn't a bittorrent for git

pabs3 4y ago
There was GitTorrent in 2015: https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gittorrent-a-decentralized-github/ https://blog.printf.net/articles/2015/05/29/announcing-gitto... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31534936 There are also multiple git-remote-ipfs projects on GitHub.
mdaniel 4y ago
In some sense, this has the same problem as TFA: who is going to seed those disused repos (same problem with ipfs linked in the sibling comment, which one can pay a "pinning node" but pay)

Gigachad 4y ago

Gitlab projects are way bigger than you’d expect. The actual git repo is usually not the biggest part. It’s the build artefacts and docker images. The average project I have worked with on Gitlab has been in the tens of gigabytes while active repos like the gitlab itself repo are in the terabytes.