Language Selection

English French German Italian Portuguese Spanish

GitLab Plans to Save Up to $1M by Deleting Inactive Projects by Free Users

Filed under
Development

Right after Microsoft acquired GitHub, many users migrated to GitLab and other GitHub alternatives.

Considering many popular open-source projects can be found on GitLab, it has a good reputation with developers and project maintainers.

Now, there has been an interesting development at GitLab, as reported by The Register

Read more

Also: GitLab plans to delete dormant projects in free accounts

GitLab plans to delete dormant projects...

As expected

  • Lilbits: GitLab could delete inactive projects, Google's messed up messaging strategy, and Purism's priciest Librem 5 Linux smartphone now ships more quickly - Liliputing

    GitLab is a software development, hosting and deployment company that’s proven popular with open source software developers and which currently hosts many popular projects. But according to a report from The Register, some of those projects could disappear soon.

    That’s because GitLab is said to be planning to start deleting inactive projects from users on GitLab’s free service tier if they haven’t been updated in the past 12 months. In order to stave off deletion, developers just need to issue a commit, open an issue, or otherwise show that the project is active. But there’s a decent chance that this policy could still lead to deletion of many older software projects that haven’t been updated in a long time, but which may still be in use or which may be relied upon by other software projects.

GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

  • GitLab U-turns on deleting dormant projects after backlash

    GitLab has reversed its decision to automatically delete projects that are inactive for more than a year and belong to its free-tier users.

    As revealed exclusively yesterday by The Register, GitLab planned to introduce the policy in late September. The biz hoped the move would save it up to $1 million a year and help make its SaaS business sustainable.

    This news did not go down well.

>GitLab won't slay those zombie repos, but a problem remains

  • GitLab won't slay those zombie repos, but a problem remains • The Register

    GitLab is chewing on life's gristle. The problem, we hear, is that deadbeat freeloaders are sucking up its hosting lifeforce. The company's repo hive is clogged with zombie projects, untouched for years but still plugged into life support. It's costing us a million bucks a year, sighed GiLab's spreadsheet wranglers, and for what?

    $1 million is certainly a lot to be wasting on a fossil collection, and is a full quarter of the company's total hosting costs. Who wouldn't want to spend it on something more fun? One answer is to cut 'em loose, which was what GitLab was expected to do from September. In an attempt to forestall the inevitable tsunami of techiness, the GitLabbers set very generous rules – a project has to be untouched for a year, there'll be plenty of warning, and the merest brush of a code fairy's gossamer wings will reset the clock.

    But that was never going to quell the outrage. Some of this is entitlement bias, but a lot of it is because of the harm done to open source when stuff just vanishes from places where it was once assured a safe harbor. Last week, just hours after The Reg exclusively broke the story, the org made a quick U-turn.

There is no 'free' hosting unless you are the product

  • Give nothing, expect nothing: GitLab’s the latest punching bag for entitled users

    What do Docker, GitLab, and Red Hat have in common? Aside from various levels of participation in open source, they’ve all been punching bags over the past few years for non-paying users angry that they’ve taken some freebies off the table.

    When Docker had the temerity to introduce limits for free users pulling containers from DockerHub, or requiring a subscription for large business users, lots of people started complaining and/or looking for a free alternative.

Comment viewing options

Select your preferred way to display the comments and click "Save settings" to activate your changes.

More in Tux Machines

today's howtos

  • How to Change Comment Color in Vim – Fix Unreadable Blue Color

    Are you annoyed about the comment color in vim? The dark blue color of the comment is often hard to read. In this tutorial, we learn how to change the comment color in Vim. There are few methods we can use to look vim comment very readable.

  • How to Add Repository to Debian

    APT checks the health of all the packages, and dependencies of the package before installing it. APT fetches packages from one or more repositories. A repository (package source) is basically a network server. The term "package" refers to an individual file with a .deb extension that contains either all or part of an application. The normal installation comes with default repositories configured, but these contain only a few packages out of an ocean of free software available. In this tutorial, we learn how to add the package repository to Debian.

  • Making a Video of a Single Window

    I recently wanted to send someone a video of a program doing some interesting things in a single X11 window. Recording the whole desktop is easy (some readers may remember my post on Aeschylus which does just that) but it will include irrelevant (and possibly unwanted) parts of the screen, leading to unnecessarily large files. I couldn't immediately find a tool which did what I wanted on OpenBSD [1] but through a combination of xwininfo, FFmpeg, and hk I was able to put together exactly what I needed in short order. Even better, I was able to easily post-process the video to shrink its file size, speed it up, and contort it to the dimension requirements of various platforms. Here's a video straight out of the little script I put together: [...]

  • Things You Can And Can’t Do

    And it got me thinking about what you can and can’t do — what you do and don’t have control over.

  • allow-new-zones in BIND 9.16 on CentOS 8 Stream under SELinux

    We run these training systems with SELinux enabled (I wouldn’t, but my colleague likes it :-), and that’s the reason I aborted the lab: I couldn’t tell students how to solve the cause other than by disabling SELinux entirely, but there wasn’t enough time for that.

  • Will the IndieWeb Ever Become Mainstream?

    This is an interesting question, thanks for asking it, Jeremy. I do have some history with the IndieWeb, and some opinions, so let’s dive in.

    The short answer to the question is a resounding no, and it all boils down to the fact that the IndieWeb is really complicated to implement, so it will only ever appeal to developers.

  • How to Install CUPS Print Server on Ubuntu 22.04

    If your business has multiple personal computers in the network which need to print, then we need a device called a print server. Print server act intermediate between PC and printers which accept print jobs from PC and send them to respective printers. CUPS is the primary mechanism in the Unix-like operating system for printing and print services. It can allow a computer to act as a Print server. In this tutorial, we learn how to set up CUPS print server on Ubuntu 22.04.

Open Hardware: XON/XOFF and Raspberry Pi Pico

  • From XON/XOFF to Forward Incremental Search

    In the olden days of computing, software flow control with control codes XON and XOFF was a necessary feature that dumb terminals needed to support. When a terminal received more data than it could display, there needed to be a way for the terminal to tell the remote host to pause sending more data. The control code 19 was chosen for this. The control code 17 was chosen to tell the remote host to resume transmission of data.

  • Raspberry Pi Pico Used in Plug and Play System Monitor | Tom's Hardware

    Dmytro Panin is at it again, creating a teeny system monitor for his MacBook from scratch with help from our favorite microcontroller, the Raspberry Pi Pico. This plug-and-play system monitor (opens in new tab) lets him keep a close eye on resource usage without having to close any windows or launch any third-party programs. The device is Pico-powered and plugs right into the MacBook to function. It has a display screen that showcases a custom GUI featuring four bar graphs that update in real-time to show the performance of different components, including the CPU, GPU, memory, and SSD usage. It makes it possible to see how hard your PC is running at a glance.

Security Leftovers

How to Apply Accent Colour in Ubuntu Desktop

A step-by-step tutorial on how to apply accent colour in Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) with tips for Kubuntu and others. Read more