What a fucking botched way to do this. Breaking all automation at a moment notice. They should have announced the change long ago. Make an advance clear deadline for accepting the ToS and then after the deadline blocked the API.
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.
Pretty sure a not for profit organization would have even less interest in pleasing their 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.
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.
That you genuinely want your clients to succeed is probably why they trust you -- you earn that trust.
I'm of the same mindset. I genuinely care about the well-being of my customers and will always work to enhancing that (even to the point of recommending competing products if they are a better solution for a particular customer). I've never lost business in the long term by doing that -- even customers I refer to competitors remember me and have an increased level of trust in me, and more often than not will do business with me in other ways.
But I have an old-school attitude towards business. My goal is not to gain as much money as quickly as possible, but to build a solid business that is sustainable and profitable over the long term. In my experience, that attitude naturally aligns my business practices with societal responsibility.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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].