Gitlab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts [rumor]

https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/04/gitlab_data_retention_policy/

by lamontcg • 4 years ago

138 60 4 years ago

theregister.com

ghuntley• 4 years ago

It's true. Internal docs have leaked.

trumpablehump• 4 years ago

Where?

misnome2• 4 years ago

Not quite a leak, but Heise claims to have gotten an "indirect confirmation" from GitLab https://www.heise.de/news/Versionsverwaltungsplattform-GitLa...

sph2• 4 years ago

If this goes through, it'll be the death of GitHub as the biggest open source hub for hobbyists and companies alike. Maybe it'll spawn a lot of self hosted git instances, I know I would consider it.

bmitc2• 4 years ago

GitLab, not GitHub.

sph2• 4 years ago

I blame it on reading HN pre-caffeinated. Thanks.

londons_explore• 4 years ago

Better plan:

"Archive" dormant projects. An archived project is stored highly compressed on hard disk rather than SSD, and in only one data center worldwide rather than globally distributed. Upon access, an archived project takes up to 30 seconds to unarchive before it can be accessed as normal.

Archived data like this is practically free to store.

NullPrefix• 4 years ago

Dormant project means no writes. Dormant project can still have a lot of reads

mirzap• 4 years ago

This is one of the reasons why Github is so superior and why it has no real competition. They understand the community and cost which that brings to them. Their product is about communities, not about hosting code. Also, it's much easier to discover other communities (or code) on Github. On Gitlab you host your code and that's it. Story ends, no discovery, no engagement, nothing.

It is great platform for managing internal projects for sure, lot of great tooling (CI/CD, package registry, etc.) but it always seemed absurd to me to build an open source community on Gitlab. It's not build for that. Everyday I discover something new on Github. On Gitlab, even when I find something I'm kind of sceptical and I never used anything anyone posted on Gitlab.

welterde3• 4 years ago

For discovery github is only marginally better. Even sites like HN or reddit are better for discovering projects that are on github/gitlab than the sites themselves.

There used to be freshmeat.net back in the day that was quite nice for discovering weird new things.

em-bee7• 4 years ago

i still don't understand why freshmeat died. was it so much work to maintain?

according to wikipedia the traffic was to low, so i guess the site didn't make any money.

but https://freshcode.club was created as an alternative site and still seems to be active

flohofwoe• 4 years ago

To me it's the other way around. Github seems to focus too much on becoming a 'social media site' instead of providing a solid collaborative development environment. Most new Github features seem to be developed in a vacuum and don't add anything useful at all.

Gitlab on the other hand, it's very clear that they are dogfooding hard and are focused much more on professional development teams. Shame though that the monetization strategy doesn't seem to work out.

(having said that: I'm hosting all my open source projects on github too, but that was more like an accident, I just picked the most popular service after Sourceforge went evil).

fariszr4• 4 years ago

There is a price to all of this.

GitHub can afford, the Unlimited Action minutes, unlimited project storage, and many other things because its owned by Microsoft, and they are playing the long game.

After Copilot and the absoulte disregard for any question about software license compliance, Its clear now what their goals are, and that's why the #giveupgithub campaign from the SFconservancy was started.

https://giveupgithub.org

BlackLotus89• 4 years ago

The solution is obvious. A cron job that auto commits to all projects.

But for real if github had this feature many of my completed projects would get deleted. I'm so glad that I selfhost my git repos on my server.

prmoustache• 4 years ago

On the other hand if they are completed you could just keep a tarball.

mdaniel3• 4 years ago

Someone on reddit suggested using GitLab CI's scheduled job to just bump a commit, so now it's costing them GCP minutes, too, as a :fu:

h2odragon• 4 years ago

The "first hit's free, kid" period is over.

"They" (including GitHub) will have to discourage self-hosting soon so as to keep their users, I wonder if the "software BoM" crap is enough or will there be further efforts that way.

figmaheart255• 4 years ago

Self-hosting on a reliable VPS is already $5+ per month. Github/Gitlab could easily undercut that. And frankly, users should start getting used to paying for software, at least it's better than having your data sold out. I'd be willing to pay $2/month to keep all my repos online.

detaro2• 4 years ago

Gitlab could easily undercut that

Of course Gitlab also got rid of the $4 tier last year, making their cheapest price point $19/month/user. If that was still around restrictions on the free tier would seem a lot more reasonable, although I think deleting abandoned stuff is fundamentally bad. (https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-... )

EamonnMR• 4 years ago

Package managers will produce an SBOM for you, the tough part is keeping track of licenses and CVEs. TideLift and BlackDuck (now called something else) work just fine as third party solutions you can run on your self-hosted stuff though.

kovalevsky• 4 years ago

projects could be saved on federated instance, as far as i know gitlab enterprise is available for free for individuals

mdaniel3• 4 years ago

do you have a citation for that claim?

Gigachad• 4 years ago

The free lunch era of SaaS products is coming to an end. I expect to see a lot more of this stuff coming up over the next few years.

em-bee7• 4 years ago

which selfhosting platform can export issues and wiki and other things besides the git repo from gitlab?

ancientsofmumu• 4 years ago

Gitea can import all those things, it's referred to as a Migration - you can sign up for a free account on, say, codeberg.org and give it a try before committing to running your own instance. Click the + button top right after logging in and choose New Migration -> Gitlab and follow your nose. Create an access token in your Gitlab account first, Gitea will need to use it.

_a9• 4 years ago

+1 for Gitea, it's super easy to set up to selfhost through something like Docker or just grabbing the executable from their site and running it on your machine. Been using it for personal repos & mirroring repos I use a lot and have I haven't had any issues or annoying errors in nearly 2 years.

fariszr4• 4 years ago

CI isnt as good, there aren't any options as advanced as Gitlab, except maybe Jenkins.

misnome2• 4 years ago

This... makes it sound like the GitLab organisation is in serious trouble, If this is the solution they have come up with to be "sustainable". There are plenty of stable GitHub projects that I use that haven't had commits in the past 12 months.

The price rises feel somewhat different now, on reflection.

twh2702• 4 years ago

According to the article, "A single comment, commit, or new issue posted to a project during a 12-month period will be sufficient to keep the project alive." Do the projects you're referring to also typically have no comments/issues?

If so, that does suggest this is a bit too big of a hammer and perhaps they should add that cloning is also sufficient to keep the project alive.

Pakdef• 4 years ago

Let me clone all repos...

bdcravens• 4 years ago

A single $5 VPS could add a space to READMEs across the entire Gitlab universe once a year

cge• 4 years ago

Yes. As a researcher, I have a number of such projects, and use a number of such projects (fortunately, it seems, on Github). In some cases, the repositories go for over a year without new commits, issues, or comments, but they do get downloaded, used, and cited, and comments tend to get made privately. In others, they're simply niche research code that can go for some time without being used, but does end up being useful later. In one case, a niche repository of some personal code I put up on a whim, with 3 commits, no comments, and the latest commit being made in 2014, had a graduate student find it and adapt it for their use a few months ago.

With package managers that pull directly from online repositories, it's also possible to have a repository of something small and stable that has no activity other than being cloned often.

I realize that I probably have the ability to get a free premium Gitlab account as an academic, but one of the reasons I ended up using Github instead was that Github's process for that was very simple and almost instant, whereas Gitlab's was frustrating and had weirdly pushy salespeople involved to the point that I abandoned the process.

ddevault3• 4 years ago

Free accounts are not sustainable. If you let investors subsidize you, it's not in the platforms best interests to work in your best interests. SourceHut charges for its services, publishes financial reporting, transparent operations information, and so on, so that you know that it's sustainable and accountable to you.

The VC-subsudized approach is not sustainable and does not work. If you want infrastructure to be sustainable and accountable to your needs, you need to get used to paying for it again.

em-bee7• 4 years ago

a few questions: is there a general FAQ besides the one about pricing?

does sourcehut have tools to import assets like wiki, issues, etc, from github/gitlab besides the git repository?

what payment options do you offer? credit card, paypal, crypto?

is there a trial period? basically, can i import my projects and make sure everything is working the way i need to before i start paying (with the expectation that if i am not satisfied, the projects will be deleted again)

if i decide to selfhost sourcehut, can i easily replicate all my projects from public sourcehut? (the promise of full data autonomy suggests that this may be a feature in the future)

is 2FA required or optional?

is it possible to pay for other peoples projects? like gandi and some other domain hosting services allow anyone to pay for any domain, even if they don't own it, such a feature would be very useful for project hosting too.

it would allow small projects to receive "donations" in form of hosting credit, or allow a project community to continue managing a project even if the account manager is unavailable.

ddevault3• 4 years ago

Some import tools exist, like this:

https://sr.ht/~emersion/gh2srht/

Unlike SourceHut, much of GitHub and GitLab does not utilize standard, interoperable formats, so import and export can be a headache.

Payment is available only through credit cards currently, but we're working on expanding it to support SEPA transfers, iDEAL, etc, now. No timeline on when it will be available. There's no trial period, but if you are unsatisfied you can request a refund.

Transferring all of your data to/from a second sourcehut instance is very easy.

2FA is optional.

You cannot pay for other projects. We considered it but decided not to add this.

bachmeier• 4 years ago

The VC-subsudized approach is not sustainable and does not work. If you want infrastructure to be sustainable and accountable to your needs, you need to get used to paying for it again.

For me, it's not even so much about having to pay, but the pricing plans.

Gitlab pays for the free users by charging $19/month for the few paying customers.

SourceHut charges $20/year.

wooque• 4 years ago

True or not, I just moved all projects from Gitlab to Github. Gitlab is on downward spiral lately.

fariszr4• 4 years ago

Be aware of Copilot.

https://giveupgithub.org

jstarfish• 4 years ago

That link appears to go to an empty directory.

mdaniel3• 4 years ago

The irony is that I would bet my company's bad docker image cleanup policy costs them more in storage than quite a bit of the free user's git repos. I can't speak to how much postgres storage the accounting takes up for all those free accounts, but ... come on

I look forward to sytse weighing in, because if true ... what a horrific blow to their reputation

ezoe• 4 years ago

Human mind can't calculate and act according the the true cost.

My colleague once estimated that rather than supporting old smartphones for a tiny percentage of existing users, thus wasting expensive engineers wage to workaround the old browser bugs, it would be cheaper to just give a free new smartphones to all existing users who still use ridiculously old smartphones. So the engineers can spend their time on more fruitful bug fix and new features that may increase the users.

twh2702• 4 years ago

I've spun up plenty of clones and tiny projects that get attention for a few (days, weeks, months) and then get abandoned. I'd have no problem with most of them getting deleted: they've served their purpose.

I'd bet there is a really long tail of projects like this, that have had no commits, views, or clones in forever.

Now, I'd prefer they be 'archived' as u/londons_explore suggests, but according to the article "A single comment, commit, or new issue posted to a project during a 12-month period will be sufficient to keep the project alive", which is a pretty low burden.

_-david-_• 4 years ago

My dot files don't get commits, comments or issues. I assume that means they will be removed?

seba_dos1• 4 years ago

This is ridiculous. I host e.g. the source code of my FLOSS games on GitLab; most of them are "dormant", because they're complete. If it turns out to be true, it means bye bye to GitLab. I may end up paying for hosting somewhere else, but I'm not going to pay GitLab a single cent after such a cruel bait'n'switch.

boleary-gl• 4 years ago

Hi all, GitLab employee here.

Wanted to make sure you saw this: https://twitter.com/gitlab/status/1555325376687226883

brainbag• 4 years ago

"We discussed internally what to do with inactive repositories. 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."

Gitlab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts [rumor]

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