Gitlab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts [rumor] | Hacker News Reader

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

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138 pointslamontcg60 comments

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.

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.

Let me clone all repos...

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

...so what you're saying is that a service to keep your gitlab project active is worth $5/yr? BRB

Even if it was $5/month they might get subscribers for that. Currently the next level above $0/month is $19/month. I could justify paying GitLab $5/month because I could justify hosting my own repos and related things on a $5/month VPS. I can't justify going from $0/month to $19/month for my usage.

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Out of curiosity, why's that?

I think the gitlab export format is actually not too bad: Just a tar file with the git repo in bundle format and all the gitlab specific components in ndjson format (and data in those ndjson files looks fairly straightforward as well on first glance). The problem is though that there are no real interoperable formats for things like tickets, project boards, CI setup, etc. (that I am aware of anyway). So everyone invents their own export format (if they even bother to implement that functionality in the first place) and importing into a different platform will always require writing some extra code and mangling of the data to account for different features.

issues could be exported as email threads. not only would that make them immediately readable offline by any mail client, but it would be easy to share them, and writing an import handler would also not be hard.

Writing an import handler for the json files is not more difficult than writing an import handler for email threads. And you want the import to reproduce what you just exported and since the source was not an actual email thread you'll have to stick quite a lot of additional information into many X-.. fields in the email headers to be able to reconstruct the original issues on import.

If you want it to be in email format it would make more sense to just write a small tool that just converts the json files into email threads after the export as an additional processing step.

not an actual email thread

github and gitlab at least send out all issues by email, so that conversion is mostly done. they can also receive email replies, so import is at least partially done too. (i don't know if new issues can be created by email).

and i believe it will be easier to standardize mail header fields than a json format.

json could then be reserved for raw data exports that are as close as possible to the native data structure of a system, while the email format would be the compromise that everyone can agree on.

unfortunately, the credit-card requirement kills sourcehut for me immediately. i know paypal is a pain when it comes to receiving payments, but it's my only option for international payments at this point. credit-cards are not common here, and getting one involves going through a lot of red-tape, especially for someone who is not local.

SEPA/iDEAL will open access to more europeans at least, where credit cards are also not common.

We're not going to be taking PayPal. However, if you don't have a supported payment method, you're eligible for free service.

that is very generous!

> 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.

Hi all, GitLab employee here.

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

"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."

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.

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.

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.

> 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-... )

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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:

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.

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

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

do you have a citation for that claim?

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

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.

+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.

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

There are a number of options. I don't know how good they are.

https://gitea.com/gitea/awesome-gitea#user-content-devops

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

Be aware of Copilot.

https://giveupgithub.org

That link appears to go to an empty directory.

Fixed, its https://giveupgithub.org

It's true. Internal docs have leaked.

Where?

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

To expand for those not reading German, the response is basically pointing to and restating https://about.gitlab.com/privacy/#data-retention

> GitLab reserves the right to delete inactive accounts, projects, namespaces, and associated content. GitLab may deem an account, project, or namespace inactive based on various criteria, including, but not limited to, the account creation date, the last time there was a valid log-in, and the date of the last contribution. If we plan to delete your account or projects, we will provide advance notice by sending a message to the email address registered to your account. GitLab encourages you to utilize your account on occasion to avoid the risk of being deemed inactive.

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.

GitLab, not GitHub.

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

No worries, lol. It happens. But I think the sentiment is accurate. I don't know who would use GitLab after this. I mainly switched to GitHub when they introduced free private repositories, but I'll definitely be switching all my remaining private GitLab repositories over.

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