Give nothing, expect nothing: Gitlab latest punching bag for entitled users
dissociatedpress.net
dissociatedpress.net
A lot of companies do openly tout and incentivize people to move to their platforms loudly advertising their free features. And given that these are infrastructure platforms, they do that knowing very well that there is a certain kind of lock-in. If you create outsized expectations in your users in the name of spurring growth, you don't get to complain about them.
I think Sourcehut does this in an ideal way. On the site it very clearly says that it's currently free, but as soon as it goes stable it expects users to pay, in fact they actually sent me an email reminding me of that fact. There's no shiny "we have all these shiny features, the first dose is free!" behaviour.
And the honesty about alpha quality is refreshing. I usually find that someone being honest about that indicates that their idea of “alpha quality” is some distance better than what many claim to be “beta” or “release” quality!
And not tracking (assuming this doesn't change in future) means that once you do pay you aren't paying twice (once with money, once with letting yourself be stalked by commercial interests).
Self-hosted option too.
Duly added to my ever-growing list of things I'd like to investigate but might never find time for…
I could imagine what happen if gmail would suddenly become a paid platform with no free tier. Users would have to change very single account they got in the world that is tied to that email, and I know in some cases you might need to contact support (through email) or use a recovery password. A lot of peoples identity is tied to a free service, a "freebie" given by a for-profit company.
I fully agree that users have some outsized expectations on free infrastructure platforms, through I wouldn't blame that on the user. User's don't generally have much choice in what platform their bought products is built on top, but it is them that feel the effect first when the bottom layer is changed under their feet.
This is the core of the issue. A user will genuinely come to the platform for those features and then is locked in. The lock in will sometimes even cost the user more than the value of the free stuff over the duration of the collaboration by virtue of not being easy to leave.
On the other hand the companies put in the freebies with the explicit intention of attracting a critical mass of users, and most of the times with the expectation that they will be removed once that target is reached. Then some creative "moral" accounting disregards that for those freebies the users also provided something of great value - they supported the platform in rising to wherever it rose. The platform may have extracted more value from the user than the user extracted from the platform. Each one of those free users probably brought a few more with them.
So while to a point I understand the "you didn't pay so you didn't lose anything" mantra, I'm also completely aware that this was part of the long term strategy of the company and it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free". A more honest and transparent strategy would be to set the expectations from the start, people can choose to take the freebie for a time knowing that at a predefined point they will cost.
And the statement that "you don't like it build another one yourself" is very biased. From the ones being at the top of a mountain supported by users who have to pay to get out, to the ones who'd have to compete with the mountain when they can only start with a hill. It's what FB will tell you when you object to their questionable practices.
A fish is unable to leave, your point is merely that it's "not easy" to leave. If you're on Gitlab then it seems pretty easy to just download your code and make an account somewhere else.
For people on Gitlab, your point about "downloading the code and moving on" really only applies to the simplest point of use on Gitlab. Anybody using Gitlab's CI/CD pipelines has everything in their repo(s) fully setup only for that, and not for other CI/CD offerings. Moving their stuff is often much much much more work than "just download your code", and sometimes with time/money constraints, completely infeasible in the short term.
Your comment brushes aside this dynamic, in favor of a naive model where users don't succumb to path dependence or local maxima. Why?
As surprising as it may sound, I think more fish manage to wiggle away from the hook than are caught. Ask any fisherman. They wiggle away with a mouth full of blood, which is what the users who have to migrate from a lock-in situation figuratively do.
Let's turn the argument on its head: GitLab can still offer the features for free, it just chooses not to. And unlike the users they have full control over the situation. GitLab decided to pull the trigger and the users have to dodge and wiggle to get away with "only" superficial wounds. That's a shitty way to deal with the situation. They could have very well grandfathered the accounts with the freebies but instead they took advantage of the situation that people have a harder time leaving than they had coming, and the power imbalance this creates.
In the context of RHEL/CentOS examples, the situation is a bit more nuanced.
I believe Red Hat was already offering a generous free subscriptions for developers, and whatever stuff like folks running labs, or trying-before-buying. Then during the CentOS Stream drama they decided to expand the free-tier to straight allow smaller "production" users, which apparently (supposedly) represented the majority of the ballyhoo'd CentOS community.
https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-...
But there were certainly large-scale CentOS deployments, who probably wouldn't qualify for the new "free-tier" terms, so perhaps they had legitimate grief? If a legitimate grief includes the right to complain for something they receive for free?
> On the other hand the companies put in the freebies with the explicit intention of attracting a critical mass of users, and most of the times with the expectation that they will be removed once that target is reached. Then some creative "moral" accounting disregards that for those freebies the users also provided something of great value - they supported the platform in rising to wherever it rose. The platform may have extracted more value from the user than the user extracted from the platform. Each one of those free users probably brought a few more with them.
And that's the nuanced part, at some point Red Hat quietly took over CentOS, paid for the copyrights, and started paying it's core team a nice salary to continue doing what they were doing. The rumor was the project was on the brink of ending, or something like that... due to not having any funding, the whole "free-tier not being profitable" problem being discussed here.
Apparently CentOS wasn't getting much in the way of donations, besides folks hosting mirrors, or donating old hardware, or sometimes even rackspace in a data-center for build-hosts used for RPM builds. Supposedly the CentOS community was really cheap, or attracted folks with those personality traits, alongside other folks who were there purportedly for the perception CentOS was extra extra stable, something along the lines of lagging behind RHEL, the thrash'n'churn would somehow be less impact. You might characterize those as the neck-beard "get off my lawn" crowd, and they are difficult to engage.
> So while to a point I understand the "you didn't pay so you didn't lose anything" mantra, I'm also completely aware that this was part of the long term strategy of the company and it's like hooking a fish and thinking "why's the fish complaining, it got the bait for free". A more honest and transparent strategy would be to set the expectations from the start, people can choose to take the freebie for a time knowing that at a predefined point they will cost.
The weird part is CentOS became the upstream for RHEL, and continues to exist, and is in many way a better choice (besides being free-tier) due to having fixes first, etc...
> And the statement that "you don't like it build another one yourself" is very biased. From the ones being at the top of a mountain supported by users who have to pay to get out, to the ones who'd have to compete with the mountain when they can only start with a hill. It's what FB will tell you when you object to their questionable practices.
But ultimately that's the point, By putting CentOS stream ahead of RHEL, the so-called black-box, or whatever Red Hat secret sauce for building enterprise Linux... was revealed to the whole world. Now, anybody can audit this work, reproduce the results; all the things... before then it was not so easy.
Subscription management of RHEL has always been an issue. There were ample ways of getting an evaluation set up or a free developer subscription but the backend work needed to get these done seemed insanely complex. I remember at some point hearing that for every free eval subscription an actual "sale" was recorded in the backend ERP (SAP?) system at Red Hat. That made quick drive-by downloads not feasible.
The developer subscription was a bit of a "hack" to extend and required you to go to an incognito window without cookies, authenticate to the developer portal which would then drop in the dev subscription into your Red Hat account. This was documented in https://developers.redhat.com/articles/faqs-no-cost-red-hat-... point 14. I cannot fathom what backend juggling necessitated this workflow.
For larger companies, managing subscription/entitlement keys was sometimes a hassle. I've heard of a handful of companies that paid for commercial RHEL subscriptions but most of the time just installed CentOS in prod as it was less of a hassle. There interesting thing here was that number of paid but unused RHEL subscriptions stayed mostly aligned with the number of machines in use. Other companies had RHEL in prod but CentOS in non-prod policies simply because it enabled quicker turnarounds and deployments.
The rumor that CentOS was on the brink of ending is something I find _very_ hard to believe. The CentOS project was a small group of people which - to the best of my knowledge - were all gainfully employed in the Linux/Admin space or sucessfully self employed as consultants and did the CentOS work in their free time as a hobby. For the consultants the CentOS connection might even have been a door opener. Bandwidth and hardware for mirrors, buildservers and webservers etc. were exclusively donations, as is very common for these projects. Even with a minimum of financial contributions or not even any at all, keeping such a project alive isn't difficult. After all, nobody is depending on the money for their livelyhoods and it's a hobby after all.
In the past there were times where drama hit CentOS-land. In 2009 LWN reported on the CentOS project founder disappearing a while ago and donations not reaching the project: https://lwn.net/Articles/345028/. That article seems to support my impression that financial contributions are not really relevant to the success of a project suhc as CentOS.
The issues with CentOS seemed more around life happening to people in control and then the project suffering: https://lwn.net/Articles/460791/ is an article from 2011 about package builds and pushes happening with delays. These issues however seemed to have been resolved some time later and delays seemed to be much less common. Interesting point: That article was contributed to LWN by the same author as the original post.
Now, considering these data points I wouldn't put a lot of faith into any rumors that CentOS was going to collapse and Red Hat came riding in to safe the day. I'd say it is much more likely that Red Hat had decided that RHEL was too restricted and fedora way to "fast and loose" to build an enterprise developer community around. Instead it might be a good idea to grab the CentOS and turn that into the development basis for ISVs, 3rd party commercial vendors and other open source projects. The Xen 4 CentOS project was a great example for this. Taking into account that a lot of these projects and special interest groups were announced shortly after the acquisition, I'd say this view isn't far from the truth.
At the end of the day, the moaning about a free alternative going away is kinda ridiculous I think. I know large users of CentOS (hundreds of thousands of machines) that had a look at CentOS stream, did talk a little bit about it amongst their different departments and decided that Stream is fine for them. If it is fine for these kind of shops, it can't be that bad.
This is why I only use Open Source, because if the SaaS company decides to change their pricing structure, I can always move to a different host or host it myself. Hence, I only ever used features on Gitlab that were in their Open Source core product. And why I am looking for an alternative that offers some of the features Gitlab has locked behind their proprietary offering.
We still have some confused/entitled users despite this, who express astonishment that online services might require payment. We generally issue refunds to these users (and simultaneously terminate paid services).
I think we need to make a cultural shift back towards paying for the things we use, so that incentives are properly aligned and there's no need to get "creative" with monetizing users.
That is if everyone acted in good faith. There are lots of services that monetize users even if they pay and will keep doing so as their primary business model is greed.
You may start off paying a company that has good intentions but those good intentions rarely seem to last.
It can be challenging to figure out what is good intention, like GitLab offering free services... Or maybe Uber Eats offering free credits as long as you install their mobile app and provide your personal information.
I'd prefer to not give any money to someone unless I know for sure what I'm getting and that it is at a fair price.
But vendor lock-in is one of the perfect factors to considerate when monetizing these services, as are short notice periods, amount of work required for migration, and time pressure. I can imagine they have more impact on final price than things like value of service, SLAs and warranties. After analysis, Gitlab found that the current prices are the best balance between getting revenue and users migrating away.
I compare this with Photobucket: it was a free image hosting site that allowed hotlinking and ended up used everywhere. One of the largest group of users was the small scale online merchants, they hosted lots (lots!) of product photos there and hotlinked them to Amazon, eBay, etc. Then overnight they changed the free users features, disabled hotlinking and replaced the images with a placeholder, unless users paid for a subscription costing USD 400,00. The hosting and bandwidth cost were not the important factors: there was a very long tail and most images were loaded just once in forever. There was a lot of less expensive sites doing the same, but the incentive for paying was the amount of hotlinked images that needed to be changed manually in a very short notice -- and the small merchants had no time nor resources to do this quickly enough, before the lost sales pile up or their ads get reported for not featuring the images. So I can suppose a lot of them just paid up. This strategy would not have worked if accounts were grandfathered.
That's the reasoning for Gitlab (and Github, it's just a matter of time): how much effort would cost to migrate away and how the projects would be disrupted until it is finished? As git is distributed and users are technically versed and can automate migration of the centralized features, it's no wonder that it cost less the Photobucked. However, there must be factors pushing the price up: one that I can easily imagine is amount of Go projects that download dependencies from repos with URLs hardcoded in source. And all their cloned copies, packaged tarballs, etc.
Seriously?
Look, when you give something away for free, you’re either a charity or you’re marketing your non-free tier products and using your large user base to drive premium users.
If a company has committed too much to their free tier and it is not sustainably driving premium users, I have little sympathy for them.
You did a marketing thing.
It didn’t work.
Sucks to be you. You are still not getting my business. I do not feel sorry for you when people lash you on Twitter and promise to leave.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for companys in this situation; it is a situation of their own engineering.
If you don’t like the product, don’t use it.
If enough people don’t use it, the conversion funnel will dry up and the company will change tunes (again).
The only thing to take note of here is, yes: if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Feel free to grumble about it and call out these companies, but don’t be surprised about it.
> The common thread here: Lots of users expect to get things for free, forever, from for-profit companies that don’t answer to them. Those users contribute almost nothing1 to the bottom line for the for-profit companies, and actively drive up costs for them.
Please, spare me.
Those users are part of the conversion funnel to paid tier users.
Gitlab would not exist without them.
If they piss them all off and they leave, it will contribute, I’d wager, significantly the total evaporation of their bottom line.
Have you considered that (and the article mentions this) the employees of said corporations, people like you and I, also want to be paid for their labor?
I think we also have to discuss the elephant in the room, that these businesses are layered on top of free software, so they are effectively reselling (and attempting to profit from) something that is free, so it's unsurprising that people's expectations when considering using open source software is that they don't need to pay for it.
Companies need to make money. Not billions of dollars in profits like Google, Amazon, Tesla, etc. But they need to at least make money to keep their services up, and then pay their employees decent wages. Otherwise they literally go bankrupt.
Software is unique in that it basically costs $0 to distribute infinity copies. Sure you may need to periodically update and host your software, but you don't really need to do that and it usually basically costs $0 to update and host anyways. As a result, most software is free! We have entire operating systems, IDEs, professional-grade tools (e.g. Blender), game engines all for free, because they can be maintained on low budgets and people's spare time. And this is how it should be, software should be free.
But this leads lots of developers to expect that everything should be free, when this is flat-out impossible. You can't expect your food, heating, clothes, etc. to be free because they cost physical resources to produce. You can't expect Google to sell laptops for free. Similarly, you can't expect hosting providers to sell storage for free, because it actually does cost resources to run those servers. GitLab has to pay for more hard drives, maintenance, electricity, rent, etc. as more people use their service, and as people use more of their services.
Blender doesn't really have to pay more whether 1,000 or 1,000,000 people use it, GitLab does. Linux doesn't really have to pay every month to keep their kernel online, GitLab does.
And yeah, companies like GitLab have paid tiers. The issue is that almost nobody uses them, even when they really should. People love to buy "free" stuff, even if something costs $1 you will have far less people buy it. Hence, why we have this entire culture of companies "buying" you via ads and tracking. They do it because consumers encourage ads and tracking in their spending habits,
And yeah, companies do have marketing. Another thing software developers don't like to accept is that companies need to market, you can have the best product but without marketing you will sell it to noone. Marketing doesn't mean spammy advertisements and aggressive tracking, there are good ways to advertise your product (like posting an in-depth review to HN with benefits and drawbacks). And marketing absolutely doesn't count as "payment". That attitude is like those influencers asking for services in exchange for "you'll be paid in reputation and experience"!
You're absolutely right that nobody needs to use GitLab, and if nobody uses it GitLab will shut down. If all developers team up and decide that they won't use GitLab unless they offer everything free, then they will shut down. Do you want that to happen? Boycotts are good when you're boycotting something like Battlefront 2 for ridiculous micro-transactions, where EA actually has the resources to scale back (and if they don't, it is they're fault, because they're charging $60 for the base game), and a competitor can form and take over. But if you boycott companies with reasonable policies for making anything paid whatsoever, you're going to end up with 0 hosting providers, no competitor is going to appear, because they simply can't exist without going broke.
You use free software every day. No matter how legit the argument is tomorrow your Linux became a subscription, I think you'd be a little miffed.
But the deeper issue is why they had to offer free tier in the first place. I highly doubt GitLab could’ve achieved nearly as much people even if they charged $1. And that’s a bad thing, because then their competitor (GitHub) would be even more dominant and be able to push more ads/other dark patterns without users leaving because they have nowhere to go.
The bottom line is that organizations which don’t just sell software but tangible resources (servers = storage and compute = tangible) need to make money. You shouldn’t blame them for charging. Yeah they shouldn’t be taking free tier stuff away, but GitLab may literally not be able to afford keeping it up. Linux is never going to not afford not becoming a subscription.
Why should they want those people if they're so entitled anyways? For the good PR? Why are they entitled to that?
As far as I see this, Gitlab offered something for the good PR, and now they want to stop offering it and still keep the good PR. Sorry Gitlab, but you're not entitled to not have me talk shit about you. Feel free to stop offering free services, but don't expect anything from me in return.
Good! The less adoption of these productized solutions, the more self-hosted instances there will be. The less attractive browser signup flow is, the more attractive download this VM image or run this Ansible (etc) playbook becomes.
These companies are running a bait and switch where they draw users in with ease of getting started, and then gradually turn up the restrictions and extraction while friction keeps users from moving away. Your appeal basically boils down to Gitlab being the underdog to Github which did this despicable thing first.
These companies are a pox on the efforts of free software. Recently, Github proactively disabled the accounts of anybody that contributed to a piece of software used by a sanctioned entity, never mind their numerous repository takedowns over the years. The discussions are full of people arguing to what degree the lawyers had to do that, while basically accepting the top-down control as a foregone conclusion. That's one hell of an attractive nuisance to the detriment of software freedom.
I'm just saying, this is a commercial relationship.
When my bank raises it's fee's I complain, but I probably won't move bank.
When I go get a coffee and they're like, 'sorry, to cover our costs the coffee is 50c more', I'm like... eh; we have a friendly relationship and I'll just wear it.
...but, and here's the thing:
If I went to get a coffee, and they were like, sorry, you have pay an extra $5 for the sugar; you think it's unreasonable and entitled to complain about that? After all the years of free sugar, surely I should just support them in these times and pay and extra $5 for the sugar on my coffee.
People going there... could complain. Or take no sugar. Or choose a different coffee shop. Honestly, it's up to them. It's pretty reasonable to feel a bit upset though, I think, in that situation.
So, my sympathy does not extend to companies that do this.
You have costs to cover? Well, I'm sure you'll figure something out. You'll probably lose some customers and gain some others. Maybe it'll work out; maybe it won't.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for companys in this situation; it is a situation of their own engineering. If it works out, it works out. If not, they'll die. It's the way of the world.
They don't need my, or anyone else's, sympathy.
100% agreed, therefore, we should keep emotions out of it.
> People going there... could complain. Or take no sugar. Or choose a different coffee shop. Honestly, it's up to them. It's pretty reasonable to feel a bit upset though, I think, in that situation.
Exactly, they can just leave, pick an alternative. Why do they take to social media and cry about it? What do they expect to gain this way?
> You have costs to cover? Well, I'm sure you'll figure something out. You'll probably lose some customers and gain some others. Maybe it'll work out; maybe it won't.
Indeed they have just figured it out - they started charging for sugar. They will lose customers, most likely, but I don't believe they haven't seen that. I'd wager that it's the customers who got caught by surprise, and our now making a big deal out of it.
In short, I agree that we shouldn't have any sympathy for the companies in this case - it's just that I'd extend that to the users as well.
Gitlab are a corporation, sure - but they're also software developers.
We-the-software-industry have long had something of a contradiction: Everybody wants to make a 6-figure salary developing software - but nobody wants to pay for a library or a database or a compiler or a linter or an OS or an IDE or a debugger or a code signing certificate, even if it's only $100/year.
If you're launching a new database, it's not enough to give the binaries away for free - developers want the full source code too, and an unlimited commercial use license. And of course, nobody will want to commit their data to it if you imply there won't be 10+ years of free updates and bugfixes. You're going to ask for donations? You'd better not do it too aggressively.
Except for a tiny handful of megacorporations like Amazon, and one or two products like Jetbrains IDEs, nobody refuses to pay developers quite like other developers.
You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
> if the linux kernel became paid
Like another comment I just replied to, [0] this conflates software freedom with price. Proprietary forks are often shunned as a lot of people care that the software they use have a Free and Open Source licence. This happens whether or not they're made available to download free of charge.
Also, the Linux kernel uses the GPLv2 licence, so non-Free forks are not permitted.
> they don't do it for charity.
Right, of course. When business interests can align with the interests of Free and Open Source projects, that's a good thing.
> You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
Yeah, I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions. But the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid, as the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free.
Well, no, they'd use the other Free and Open Source Unix-like kernels, in particular FreeBSD. If we woke up tomorrow and there were no Free and Open Source kernels around at all, we would of course want to create one. This is why the Hurd kernel was started, after all. [0]
There are already various non-Free kernels out there. Windows is the obvious one, but also HP-UX and Oracle Solaris. There are also some freely available proprietary kernels, such as Menuet 64.
> you will never find a lack of free compilers, OS's, programming languages etc
It's fun to dabble in those fields, but doing serious work in compiler engineering or operating systems is just that: serious work. Major FOSS projects are very often powered largely by paid developers with specialized skills.
> since companies wants a free OS for their servers they would start to contribute to whatever OS that looks the most promising, we would have another free big OS for most service needs running very quickly
Hopefully we would, yes.
> I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions
Not really, no. The list includes the Linux kernel, MySQL, Postgres, OpenJDK, GCC, LLVM, Chromium, and Firefox. Those aren't mere exceptions, and they're not the kind of software that can be achieved on a have-a-go basis.
> the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid
Right, as I've been saying, business interests can align with those of a FOSS project, hopefully benefiting both so that sustainable progress can be made.
> the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free
It's not clear what you're saying here. You're right that most paid software work is not released as FOSS. A lot of paid software work is on software that isn't intended for use by software developers, so they're never going to be the user anyway.
1. A strange reluctance to financially support important software projects
2. Insistence on Free and Open Source software
I agree the first point is a legitimate failing of the software community, such as it is. I get the impression only a few percent of software professionals (or for that matter software-powered organisations) have ever, say, financially supported a FOSS project.
The second point though is not a failing. The problems with non-Free software are very apparent.
I mean, someone who is fitting bathrooms or writing books or teaching piano will say "here are my wares, here are my prices" and the customers will pay.
But the major open source licenses all say "here are my wares, no charge, feel free to redistribute to all your friends too" - of course they're not paying, I just told them they don't have to pay.
If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?
One is a concern about freedom, the other is being a cheapskate. They're very different positions.
Plenty of people donate to FOSS projects or to associated organisations like the FSF and OSI, but it's a shame the numbers aren't higher by a few orders of magnitude.
Monetising Free and Open Source software is unfortunately not always easy, but it's not as if it never happens. Most Linux kernel contributions are from paid kernel developers, for instance. Some projects make money from paid support services (LibreOffice, RedHat), or offering a hosted deployment of the software (SourceHut).
> If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?
You're right that there's nothing to stop a major cloud provider from making easy money offering a managed service powered by FOSS, then giving little to nothing back to the project itself.
This is the reason mongoDB is unfortunately no longer using a FOSS licence.
It seems you've misheard then. Any vendor is saying "here are my services, here are my prices" and customers will pay (the real customers that is).
The open source licenses are part of the deal but not an intrinsic part of the business, hence the distinction makes sense.
It's up to us engineers to say: (1) I demand source code for my own benefit; (2) hey dude, pay for a RHEL subscription, apparently that money/power trickles to the actual engineers that do useful things for my own benefit! The rest of the world simply does not know about these two types of benefit if engineers don't speak. For (2), it's understandable that people think RHEL subscription is just 100% money wasted if they don't go opening any support tickets. Where instead maybe 90% of the money does go to execs but 10% benefits back the FOSS users around the world, figuratively speaking.
Also, there are plenty of good FOSS projects that aren't seeing much corporate use, such as perhaps KDE.
(Although Google are known for using Linux as a desktop OS, perhaps including KDE, I'm not certain.)
It's because "I could probably just do it myself" (or someone gives away their work for free as a résumé portfolio piece and that becomes the de facto standard)
Do something really well for fun? Just a cool admirable hobby. The second you start to do it for money it becomes a job and people will judge you in a completely different light.
As usual money ruins everything.
>we are offering this for free as a company. no guarantees
if you think one's criticizable and the other one isn't I don't know what to tell you
The sole point of a corporate entity is to make money. That's the whole point. There's no reason to assume otherwise unless it's a clear non-profit organization.
People don't make a company out of the goodness of their heart. Hell, they wouldn't even open one if they didn't have to do it to pay taxes. Speaking from experience here.
GitLab is an 8 year old underdog that's trying to push the limits of software development support and they made a change that affects "fewer than 2% of Free tier users within 0.3% of namespaces."[1] Maybe they don't know wtf they're doing but who does in this space? It's relatively new, competition is frantic, and companies are trying things. Maybe they always were planning on doing this, but maybe there were unintended consequences to offering this wide open free tier and they need to correct to stay solvent.
Whatever the reason you're absolutely right: If you don't like the product, don't use it. That 2% of the freeriders weren't going to convert anyway so losing them (and a few of their cheerleaders) from the funnel won't hurt them at all, because in the end they supply excellent value to the other 98% of their base.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
Offer the free service, but put limits in place right from the start. Only this many free repos, only this much free data, etc. Removing a limitation later on is easy to do. Putting a limitation in place is hard, and results in bad press.
It's also fairer to users - they know what to expect, they know the limitations and the rules. They aren't caught by surprise when the rules change on them.
My point is that launching with a free tier and applying limits later has been an effective monetization strategy for many successful startups.
Gitlab might be a special case because of open source projects; providing a service and then asking for money from people that in many cases work for free does feel a bit pointless.
(Again, I’m not talking about targeting an audience where open source projects are the majority, but about a more general scenario.)
Yet another example of how we've normalized dishonesty and deception.
Also, how is that deception? Most startups never claim that their plans will be forever free and unlimited.
How I see it, free comes with risks. If you want less risk, choose a paid service.
(Obviously the situation is different for open source projects that don’t have money and that are already run by volunteers.)
Either you offer a generous free tier in perpetuity and get all the nice things that come with that, or you don't, and build goodwill some other way.
This idea that time is money, that everything a company offers should be compensated, is bullshit. The tech industry -- especially startups -- got to where they are today all the goodwill of nerds and early-adopters, and they would constantly ply them with free stuff so that it would plant seeds in their minds that would later blossom to convince the decisionmakers to buy their product.
But it also had the effect of empowering entire generations of future tech workers, by giving them hands-on experience that later translates to useful employees and loyal customers. Microsoft is said to have a similar idea by not cracking down on Windows piracy too hard ... better they're running a pirated copy of Windows than Linux or Mac!
So yes, companies should give their stuff away for free. There is too much focus on dollars and money with how they operate, it's like we forget that they are made of people and that they SERVE other people (their customers). Everything having its price is an extrene sense of entitlement on behalf of management
Offering free hands-on experience seems like a version of “work for exposure”; even if it can be effective at times for a given company, I’d say on a larger scale it makes the market less healthy.
E.g. it might give unfair advantage to larger companies that can afford to offer free services; smaller businesses might have more trouble with growth and getting recognised.
It's important for your company's messaging that you be accurate here.
I'll also take the opportunity to express my disappointment that GitLab has decided that Microsoft's offering should be the home of any open-source project of significance; I think that's bad strategy. But it's not my call.
You are correct that in order for projects to be eligible they must not be seeking profit. This is listed as a requirement on the program page: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/.
You can see many of the open source projects of significance who are part of the program here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/partners/
> While most partners are also members of the GitLab for Open Source Program, not all are (as some partners are commercial open source entities and therefore ineligible for the program).
Source: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
You can see many of the open source projects of significance who are using GitLab here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/partners/
Will a individual developer be able to create a repo for a small FLOSS project under these terms? I don't see the option there.
And before somebody says that a small project will fit a free tier, remember that this entire discussion was born from the fact that free tiers can be removed 5 minutes from now if Gitlab wants to.
The requirements are:
- use an OSI-approved license
- not seeking profit
- be publicly visible
> Program members must renew their memberships annually.
> Upon acceptance to the GitLab for Open Source Program, all program members are subject to the GitLab for Open Source Program Agreement.
Source: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
That's usually called bait and switch.
1: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NFLX/
2: https://time.com/6198354/netflix-subscribers-loss-second-qua... (If you have JavaScript disabled remove position: fixed from the body to read, or https://archive.ph/tGzqK)
I can accept that services change, but it’s not reasonable to create an unplanned panic for customers needing to migrate infrastructure or pay up under time duress.
if you do start off with a set of limitations, it's not as big of a splash in initial user engagement, and you also end up with less network effect.
So it does make business sense to offer a bigger free plan and make that splash, despite having to pay for it later in bad press.
In the particular case, Gitlab clearly offered the free repos to compete with Github. They had to get mindshare and marketshare to then get paying customers. If they had not offered free repos at the start on the same (or better) terms than github, would they have ended up with as many paying customers as they did?
So the business plan (whether intentional or not, and I don't know) for many of these companies is to offer a free service in order to get mindshare and marketshare, then once you have a sustainable amount of attention and paying customers, eliminate or reduce that free service. (Or, in other cases, change your licensing from open source to something else).
To me, it seems both wholly expected, and wholly justifiable, for users to find this annoying and manipulative, and complain about it. Of course, users could avoid the free service in the first place predicting this is coming, sure, hypothetically. And companies could, hypothetically, avoid following this playbook if they don't want to upset users...
An alternative model is to keep offering what you promised in the free tier. and make new feature development paid only.
I'd say anybody who is still showing up expecting free pizza has made a mistake.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
If you give away free pizza for a week, it won't be a big deal. After a certain amount of time, people expect it and will be quite upset when it ends, no matter how you try to prepare them.
Of course, others are more reasonable. But there are far too many who will simply expect it forever.
I'm going to put this on its own line just to highlight it:
[...] find another free service to build their infrastructure on.
W-w-who actually thinks that's a good idea to begin with?
Lots of people use only the basic features (git, issues, merge requests, maybe the CI with Gitlab runners or self hosted runners)
The premium package may be too much, for people who are not interested in the 100s of premium/enterprise features they Gitlab is building or where paying per seat quickly becomes uneconomical.
Shameless plug: I'm building a managed Gitlab hosting at https://hosted-git.com/. I'm still happy with the Gitlab product but I think there's a gap in their offering for SMEs/small teams who may otherwise jump ship and migrate to a competing offer given the very competitive landscape!
Hopefully paying per server will be a good alternative and give customers more control.
The premium tier still provides a ridiculous amount of value for it's price.
For truly open source projects, they have a really generous program giving seats that normally cost 100 dollars a month away for free.
We liked and paid for Gitlab, but the price hike from $4 to $19 per user is absurd. Forcing an annual subscription on us was the motivation we needed to migrate away.
I just… I can’t present that to management as a good deal. There is no way whatsoever that that’s worth it. We can get all of the things Gitlab does separately, better and at a lower price…
It's a market economy and as a startup, Gitlab took a strategy to differentiate and grow.
Wouldn't say users are taking advantage of "Gitlab Inc"
We've had a hard time selling the price increase to upper management, the $5 per seat was perfect. We have tons of users who log in once or twice a month just to look at something and paying $20 for that doesn't make sense.
Also, we really don't care about 99% of the features they keep pumping out. They're great if you're a smaller company starting out, but larger ones already have other tools that are established and won't be going away. I don't need a half baked JIRA clone, or half baked GitOps, or any of the other myriad of strange features. I only want required merge request approvals, yet it's all in the same $20 version. Oh, and I'd also like to use the API to retrieve project avatars, but that's one of those issues that have been open for years.
You end up with a product developers hate, but VPs think looks good in their spreadsheets
I consume maybe a few megabytes of disk space. Why do they want to get rid of me so badly? In the past I have highly recommended GitLab because they are actually really good, but stuff like this does make me rethink that.
Isn't their max size announced a few days ago set to 5 Gigs? I also use it for a few personal projects that I want to make available to others and I also have a few megabytes. That's a very long way from 5 gigs.
For my usage, a $5/month VPS running Gitea will suffice. If I have to pay more than $5/month for git hosting then I'll just do it myself.
We have a small enough repo so will just stick with the free version I guess. They should have like $10/mo (for up to 5 developers) to cover small teams that just use basic features. I would happily pay that, but anything else is just stupid for simple git storage.
If you offer a service for free, you should be able to keep offering that for free (with paid upgrades instead of removing functionality from a free tier/removing the free tier entirely).
It's not that users are entitled to free products, but companies using dishonest marketing of a free tier for their own gain.
Free users may not be paying costumers, but they do invest their time into the product (that they probably wouldn't have otherwise), and more importantly, they spread the word about the product.
Imagine the amount of advertising money the company would have to spend in order to reach as many customers as they have with the help of free users.
If you can't afford to offer your free tier permanently, be upfront about it. As there are business models that can afford permanent free tier and users can't know which kind of free is your offer. Don't dishonestly use free users for marketing purposes and dump them when you don't need them anymore.
But It's not necessarily about the money. We're no big enterprise, we're a bunch of small onlineshops and a few other operations. I'd be very happy for my employer to toss RedHat some coins. We're not stupid, I know that for RedHat to stay around they need money. I'm also a big open source advocate, so I'd be more than happy.
But how do you even do that without involving a lot of overhead? DigitalOcean, our infrastructure provider, doesn't even offer any paid Linux. You pay for the VM and that's it. As far as I know, it's the same for AWS, Azure and what-have-you.
RedHat needs to rethink their business model, maybe partner with these providers so they get a cut of the price from DigitalOcean. I'd be more than happy about that, heck, you could even include a small contingent of support tickets with the VM. Maybe a cheap CentOS VM w/o support and a slightly more expensive RedHat VM. I could definitely have used that at some points!
So, RedHat, please - take our money!
That said, there are providers that will sell you paid for OSes for a monthly extra fee. They're just not US technology giants :)
What I want is an easy "20$/month CentOS, 24$/month RedHat" offer where all of that is taken care of.
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/partners/google
[2] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/compute/ubuntu-pro-av...
[3] https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-moderniza...
But I wonder, could digital ocean make it easier? Does redhat provide VM images in which you only have to enter license key, or is the process more complicated (e.g. you have to get these images from a paywalled url?)
The raison d'etre of RedHat is to take away Linux problems from users' concern.
This is the big appeal of e.g. AWS Linux. If I want a VM I can get one in about three clicks and 60 seconds. Sure, it won't be as custom-configured as I want it, but it's an over-generalisation to say that if you can't image a VM you shouldn't use one. Plenty of dev folk out there expert in Ruby/Java/whatever that wouldn't know where to start. I can't do even basic mechanics, does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to drive?
I've not used it for RHEL, etc, but I've used it for appliance-style images.
I have both free and (multiple) paid accounts with GitHub for example. If I complain about limitations in their free tier, I am still also a paying customer of GitHub at the same time which is important context.
That's not to say that the "entitlement bias" being talked about here for free services is appropriate, but it's just extra context to keep in mind.
By the same token, I use a lot of Cloudflare's free services, but I've also brought them a lot of business, have multiple accounts and external customers on paid tiers etc. So I am a revenue generating customer for them.
As a customer, I evaluate these companies' services on the sum total of my experience across my paid and unpaid accounts.
As a side note, this can also backfire when it comes to support. I feel that I get pretty bad support from Cloudflare at times, because they seem to treat me as one of their many freeloaders [0], when in fact I've had multiple Pro and Business plans with them and until recently have introduced new customers to them too (which they won't necessarily be able to track). When they respond to me, they don't really have a clear picture of my value to them as a customer, and I think it shows.
So when analysing how a company treats its "freeloader" users, its worth bearing in mind that a significant proportion of those users may also be revenue-generating for them, some in ways that won't be obvious.
[0] I use "freeloader" here as a purely descriptive term about the commercial relationship and not as a judgement.
“Freebie RHEL” is an odd choice of words. It’s been literally decades since I meddled with RHEL, but CentOS as I recall it was the community response to RedHat essentially trying to cordon off a whole distribution’s worth of FOSS, and charge money for it. I am surprised to learn from Wikipedia that RH succeeded in capturing governance if CentOS sometime in the teens, and not surprised at all to see that another project, Rocky Linux, arose to take its place.
My understanding is that over time RH became the main maintainer of CentOS organically, so they were fronting both the direct costs (dev time) and indirect costs (people using CentOS as a cheaper RHEL).
First, free users still have the right to complain. Freedom of speech. I have grievances about Windows and MS, and I don’t even use it.
Second, complaining is just words. It’s not like users of Gitlab are demanding financial compensations. They are just talking. It’s Gitlab’s right to choose to listen or not listen.
“You didn’t pay for it so shut up you entitled free user” is one of those ideas that just don’t work in practice.
I wonder, what makes this "useless" in your mind?
> “You didn’t pay for it so shut up you entitled free user” is one of those ideas that just don’t work in practice.
I agree with this, but not for any of the extremely dumb "reasons" you've provided.
I’m just saying that free users and frankly non-users have such a right, and are acting in accordance with what they are fully entitled to do.
The act of complaining has nothing to do with payment. It’s you see something you disagree with, you can complain about it. Whether the target has a preexisting contract with you is irrelevant.
We sure love to complain. It's our freedom of speech.
I would happily pay $20-50 a year for a "Solo" GitLab plan.
I have a handful of small repos hosted by GitLab. I don't use CICD for those repos.
I also have Github and Bitbucket accounts if necessary.
A problem with having a smaller account is that once people are paying anything they expect, rightly so, more support than the free account, and the company has to account for this. It might be more trouble than it is worth to take the money for smaller accounts. You or I might never touch that support, maybe the majority won't, but some very much will.
Our apps (in DayJob) service regulated financial industry companies (T&C and compliance side, not dealing with the money) and we have paying clients who are essentially paying costs because of how much time they drain (one of my regular tasks: proving that bad data has once again been sent in a nightly feed from a 3rd party system which is why we rejected the data). Free users are obviously costs too (they use resource) if you ignore the market-share and mind-share aspects, but it may be that low-cost users would be a worse prospect for the business.
Also offering multiple pricing plans can cause confusion for some users who already don't 100% know what they actually want.
They quickly backpedaled after it turned out this generated really bad PR, but it does clearly demonstrate why GitLab's free tier does _not_ cover you.
But yes, I know this is not the full story and I'm not even sure I have a Gitlab account, so I'm at least not an entitled user of their service in any noticeable manner ;)
When a business offers something for free there's always and everywhere a commercial imperative behind it that is calculated to be to the beneift of the business (any consumer benefit is incidental).
Fundamentally the problem with this move is that it's anti-consumer. A corp wears some cost up-front to feed some benefit, and then when the cost to the consumer to switch is high enough, they pull the original deal (and yeah, as someone else said, this often happens sometime after institutional money gets involved).
At least drug dealers have the temerity to TELL you that only the first one's free. Corps that bait and switch like this without grandfathering in the people they made the original deal with are straight up exploitative.
Put whatever lipstick you want on that pig Joe, you're not a make-up artist, you're a shill.
Users are absolutely right to be upset at Gitlab, Docker, etc. who pull a bait-and-switch on the community. Users adopt the product because of the infra foundation is free, and then comes the rug pull when the product reaches market saturation.
This almost always happens right after a capital raise...
The goal of which is to seek monopoly or at worst stable oligopoly.
Anyway, GP was asking what you call it when you saturate/dominate a market, become the standard and then raise prices on your captured audience. This is definitional monopoly. VC-backed capitalism is a predictable symptom emerging from the possbility of such outcomes.
If it was done in a year or immediately after gaining huge momentum, then sure we'll listen, but again, GitHub has been around for so long that it's clear they simply couldn't predict the growth and handle the increase in cost.
I believe it is an opportunistic bait-and-switch.
I don't know exactly what's going on at GitLab, but this is a classic pattern when the motivations of founders ("Let's make something cool to help other coders, and make a buck in the process") are supplanted by the motivations of VCs ("Fuck the coders, lets make as much money as possible in the term.")
Edit: Can add to that second sentence "...and exit just after the profits tick-up, but before the market has enough time to migrate off our platform.")
It's like if I dressed up like a referee, went downtown to where some kids were playing basketball recreationally, screwed up a bunch of calls because I don't know what I'm doing, then got offended by the kids because they jeered my bad calls. I would be especially unsympathetic if I were only volunteering to referee the games for free as part of a for-profit scheme where I charge people to bet on the games.
Dunno how that story ends, I jumped ship. I think they were looking into Rocky.
Treating the free tiers as just a taste of the paid tiers is a misunderstanding of how this business works. It also reduces the worth of the paid tiers. Gitlab will be worth less as a business because of this, but perhaps they're focused on selling CICD and giving up on competing with basic github.
And Docker simply gave up on their stranglehold of containers. Of course people complained and looked for free alternatives, and it will be Docker that suffers. They don't have much of a business model.
It's much rather about how clumsy the change was: Bring out Centos8 first for a year or two as usual, and then slash the EOL and change how the distribution works massively post-fact.
Shit, they could even use Fedora.
For instance, btrfs is default in Fedora now. RHEL doesn't even ship it.
Red Hat has Fedora, CentOS and RHEL. The new approach makes sense to me, Fedora is the upstream to RHEL, RHEL is the upstream to CentOS. Additionally, users can use (up to a limit) RHEL for free now.
Also, the nature of projects is very different. RHEL is available to be repackaged (e.g. Rocky) by the community with Red Hat´s blessing.
A better analogy would be GitLab ending the freemium, but adding free enterprise GitLab for x accounts and giving the source of GitLab enterprise to the community to distribute as they want (but without official support)
What are you talking about? The outrage was about ditching CentOS 8, and introducing CentOS stream, which is upstream to RHEL.
It sucks that there is no common way of supporting OSS projects, but I guess that's nothing to complain about.
There was never any chance of me paying for rhel if they had been upfront about the support lifetime of centos I would have just used Debian and every one would be happy. The only problem was them binning it over night. If your business does a rug pull like this what else are people going to think?
- Edit - If a business says one thing it's not entitled for people to expect them to keep to their word, if they don't keep to their word you can expect backlash, thats not entitlement. The whole thing reads as "Consumers need to think about the feelings of corporations"
The community has given a lot to GitLab. Every project that moved there had a network effect of bringing people over. So many have contributed to GitLab itself, both patches, bug reports, feedback, etc.
And lots of devs have advocated at their place of work for a "let's move to something more open that GitHub" and moved entire organisations onto GitLab (I've seen this at multiple places of work).
Not to mention that GitLab itself is built atop countless hours of work put into the libraries and foundations it uses.
The open source ecosystem is a community where most parties are contributing and consuming what others contribute. It's ridiculous to portray GitLab as a "received nothing" entity.
You either need to charge for everything according to usage, place reasonable-and-transparent acceptable use limits on everything, or accept this dynamic.
This was all predictable: Remember SourceForge?
For a business, somebody is getting paid to maintain self hosted servers on hardware (virtualized, on prem or in cloud) that are also not free, and besides the hardware cost you also have the cost of simply keeping them running.
For personal use, it is only free in the sense that you don't value your free time. Initial setup is the smallest part of it. If you intend on exposing your services to the internet, you also need to be on top of patching, reviewing logs and much more.
I've been self-hosting for decades, but these days i simply use whatever cloud offering fits my needs. It's usually cheaper, and/or much more resilient than what i had at home.
Git on its own requires nothing in resources. I have an instance of gitea running in a container since many years. Its marginal cost now is less than $1?
Sophisticated software like, say, Adobe's products are expensive to develop and maintain. Eventually, Adobe's bundling and required subscription fees made me leave their suite of high-quality products because I'm not a media professional in any sense. On the other hand, despite being a long time Emacs user, I don't mind paying for JetBrain's products. They are high quality and are definitely worth what I pay for them.
Expect to pay for what you use and be grateful for anything that is given for you.
They host a free tier and they keep moving stuff out of it without much warning.
But quite simply this article is invalid because it’s not even accurate about its facts. Gitlab also removes features for paying users. They frequently move features that were present in a certain tier to more expensive tiers.
"Oh you were using a free service, and it became paid? And you're not going to pay? Then nothing of value was lost. Move aside and make room for someone who will pay." - The companies, probably.
An example of this is Facebook. It's free for the users but it does track and sell a lot of your personal data. Without complaints from users we would never have seen things like the ios adpocalypse or GDPR.
I'm sure the person who wrote this doesn't read HN but still wanted to give my 2 cents.
Why doesn't being "the product" give you stake to complain?
Providing a service like Gitlab does costs money. The more people use it, the more it costs them. The bigger the projects they host, the more it costs them.
Maybe at one point X feature was practical for them to provide for no cost. Now that they're larger, X feature is now too costly to provide for free.
I don't think it's reasonable for everyone to use whatever pricing scheme would work at the huge scale when they haven't made it there yet. That's a recipe for killing the product fast. So - start with what works to get yourself off the ground and adapt as inflow and outflow of cash change.
If you don't like it, there are plenty of alternatives.
How do you plan to pay for your free lunch?
Perhaps then we’ll get something better than git.
<sarcasm> Sure. That makes sense... </sarcasm>
Grow up
To me, this feels almost inevitable for any service that might need to provide lots of storage to its users. It's actually kind of surprising how expensive most cloud storage is.
Personally, I just migrated over to having my own Nexus instance for all of my container images, with custom cleanup policies (e.g. dev repository is purged every week, prod one has a different policy), as well as there's the obligatory proxy repository that acts as a cache for pulling things from Docker Hub or elsewhere. Currently it's hosted in a VPS with a HDD, though if I need even more storage, I'll just move over to my homelab with more HDDs, which are way more cost effective than renting lots of space, even with smaller local providers.
Of course, for many it will be infinitely more cost effective (e.g. when they don't want a learning experience) to just pay Docker Hub or another provider to use their managed container registry. That might not always be viable when planning things for an enterprise setting, though, which is when this knowledge about self-hosting and on-prem deployments might come in handy.
> Now, GitLab is making changes to its free tier and may zap inactive repositories or repos that are too large.
In my eyes, that's probably the same problem and honestly the idea of purging data that nobody has accessed for a while seems like the logical outcome.
Let's take this argument to the extreme, just for fun - what would happen if GitLab would store this data in perpetuity (assuming the company survives)? Would we end up with 100 year old repositories by people whose descendants will manage them? Or, you know, a bit of a graveyard?
> When CentOS moved from a direct clone of RHEL 8 to the CentOS Stream model, hordes of people raised virtual torches and pitchforks because they were no longer able to run a freebie RHEL clone.
Here, I think there is more nuance. I think the thing that upset the community was not that CentOS was killed off (in its previous free-RHEL-alternative sense), but rather that the EOL was changed. Instead of announcing that CentOS 8 will be supported until its approximate EOL of 2034 (since most other releases were supported for ~10 years), instead they changed it to 2021, just 2 years after release.
Even CentOS 7 will outlive it, its life span being 2014-2024. So many enterprise deployments went wrong because of this choice and people were understandably upset. Moreso, there weren't really that many alternatives to it with a similar reputation: Rocky Linux took time to get up to speed, Alma Linux isn't quite as widely trusted and many would prefer not to use Oracle Linux for certain reasons.
Alas, it was a bit of a mess, especially when you are in circumstances where nobody will feasibly pay for RHEL but want something like it.
Uh, what?
> The first stable release of AlmaLinux was published on March 30, 2021.
It's a relatively new project that some might not believe in quite as much as something like CentOS, that has a long and proven track record across multiple releases throughout the years.
That's also the problem that Rocky Linux will have in the minds of some, which might get someone laughed out of the room (exaggerating a bit) for suggesting something other than RHEL or Oracle Linux nowadays.
Of course, personally, as long as the community behind either project has a good reputation and hasn't given me a reason to assume otherwise, I think that AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux are both decent distros. I just hope that the projects have a bright future ahead of them.
Why should one care about a company's feelings? Dealing with entitled users is one cost of doing business and it is already included in the price.
> Lots of users expect to get things for free, forever, from for-profit companies that don’t answer to them. Those users contribute almost nothing to the bottom line for the for-profit companies, and actively drive up costs for them.
Are you serious? Give me shares and I will contribute to the company's bottom line. What a lousy proposition.