[HN Gopher] Upcoming changes to user limits on Free tier of Gitl...
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Upcoming changes to user limits on Free tier of Gitlab SaaS
Author : HieronymusBosch
Score : 114 points
Date : 2022-03-24 15:22 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
| client4 wrote:
| While its sad to see gitlab go this path (I've converted two orgs
| to paid accounts on them) I always look at the silver linings.
| I've been meaning to move my personal stuff to sourcehut and this
| is the little shove I needed.
| activitypea wrote:
| I abhor the "This only impacts 1% of our users" line. Putting the
| obvious "then why do it" aside, it's just coming out and saying
| "we are okay with screwing individual users over, as long as
| there's not so many of them that we get in trouble".
| squaresmile wrote:
| Yeah, I have been finding these internal justifications kinda
| odd in a public announcement. As a user, ether I'm affected or
| I'm not. 99% or 1% doesn't concern me. I don't think I would
| react differently if the number is 5% or 25%.
|
| I agree the implication feels a bit like don't bother
| complaining since you guys are an insignificant portion of the
| userbase. Cool, good to know I guess.
| chatmasta wrote:
| The fact the change only impacts 1% of users doesn't mean much
| on its own. How much are those users costing GitLab?
|
| Agreed it's a weird point to include in an announcement,
| especially when 100% of the people affected by the announcement
| are in the 1% of users.
| treis wrote:
| One of these days anti-trust regulators need to look at these
| "free until we get market share" plans. This isn't a particular
| egregious example, but it is pretty classic dumping.
| adtac wrote:
| >anti-trust
|
| This has absolutely nothing to do with antitrust. The word
| antitrust has lost all meaning.
| fartcannon wrote:
| How many more SaaS price increases before folks realize its
| better to self host?
| mindwok wrote:
| Gitlab self hosted is awesome as well. It's a single install
| that embeds everything Gitlab needs and also has a config
| management system bundled that simplified config enormously
| (Chef Omnibus for those interested). We just automatically
| update from the Debian package and it's been pretty much fire
| and forget.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Do they count only users registered on the whole namespace/group
| or all users registered in each sub git project inside the
| namespace / group ?
| lazypenguin wrote:
| https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/
|
| _Q. What does namespace in the context of user limits refer
| to?_
|
| _A. In GitLab, a namespace is a unique name for a user, a
| group, or subgroup under which a project can be created. User
| limits are implemented at the top level group or personal
| namespace. For example: If a user has a group named top and two
| sub-groups under top named child1 and child2 with 4 users each,
| then the top namespace will have a total of 8 users, which is
| above the user limit of 5._
| ttoinou wrote:
| Thanks but still confused because it doesn't discuss git
| projects.
|
| If I have Group A which has A/privateGit1.git with 4 users
| and A/privateGit2.git with 4 others different users then
| Group A has 8 users ?
|
| Also it becomes more complex with guest users
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. Yes, you are correct.
|
| We count the unique sum of users within a namespace which
| includes the users in the parent namespace (group),
| subgroups, and projects.
|
| I created an MR to update the FAQ to make this more clear:
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
| com/-/merge_request...
|
| Thanks for the feedback.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| exactly, 8 unique users in A/
| franga2000 wrote:
| It seems like every SaaS out there is targeting only the very
| occasional users and large enterprise users, but nothing in
| between. If this announcement read "we're limiting Free Tier, but
| creating a new 10$/month plan that gives you what you had before"
| I'd be signing up immediately. But per-user pricing, especially
| with the lowest plan being 20$/u/m, is absolutely insane for
| anyone but big corporations and startups drowning in VC money.
|
| Some practical examples: - if I participate in a 48h game jam
| with my usual team, it would cost us 120$ to host our code on
| GitLab. For 2 days!! - the non-profit I develop for would need to
| pay 1680$ a year, despite all but 2 of our repos being FOSS. That
| is literally 3/4 of the budget we had last year!
|
| Server load, bandwidth and disk space are the things that cost
| money and they are barely correlated with the number of users in
| all but a handful of textbook scenarios. Why does everyone insist
| on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless
| metric?
| bluescrn wrote:
| The cloud service business model usually seems to turn into
| some form of bait+switch, based on getting loads of new users
| in, some percentage who will become quite dependent on the
| service, then cranking up the prices.
|
| If something is free, cheap, and relatively new, be prepared
| for disappointment.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's an intentional bait and switch, just the
| "natual" pivot to b2b/enterprise sales where its a lot more
| straightforward with how to make money, I guess.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I definitely agree, per user pricing is also awkward because it
| prices everyone the same when there's a huge disparity in how
| they use the product.
|
| The same price for developers and testers who use it every day,
| but also the person who logs in twice a year to generate a
| report.
|
| You end up with a product that's more difficult to use because
| costs end up influencing who can access it.
| hhh wrote:
| As with all things, there's a lot of flex in there. In our
| environment, if you don't use it in 90 days your license goes
| back to the pool. If you log back in after that, you
| immediately gain it back. Your user is just disabled, not
| deleted.
|
| https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/subscriptions/self_managed/#billa.
| ..
| existencebox wrote:
| My somewhat cynical hypothesis regarding "Why does everyone
| insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a
| useless metric" (And I do not mean this as a dig at Gitlab, to
| be clear, just an examination of the strategy.)
|
| If there is a curve "amount of money a company of a given size
| will pay", in certain applications, server load, bandwidth, and
| disk space utilization likely scales far below that trendline,
| whereas per-user tracks far closer. It also ensures there is
| effectively no upper bound on CLTV as a given customer scales
| out, even if net-usage only increases
| logarithmically/asymptotically.
|
| To try and be even-handed and take a more generous
| interpretation as well, the former is also less likely to be
| cogently communicable to a customer, and may have painful UX
| when limits are hit.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| You took the words out of my mouth.
|
| Except I would say what instead of a certain applications
| this is true for the most of applications. If something
| doesn't uses tons of traffic/storage and is user facing then
| the resources spent per user are minuscule, you would spend
| more time and (even literal) energy to actually track and
| bill the user for the spent resources and somehow explain why
| some resources are billed for the insane rates (because you
| need to bill some thing for insane rates to make up $10
| ARPU/month).
|
| I had the same problem recently - I was musing about re-
| selling my monitoring solution (I'm using it myself, at like
| ~2% of the VPS I'm renting) and the first thing of course was
| the idea to base the price on the load each client would
| generate... and I pretty quickly come to a conclusion what I
| can't reasonably price things at $0.10 per unit, because the
| time I would need to spend on the setup is way, way more
| costly for me than that _and that doesn 't include billing
| hassles in any way_.
|
| So yes, billing per user is not only beneficial for the
| provider on the "user is paid wherever it uses the resource
| or not" but also allows the provider to not to spend time and
| money on actually implementing the way to bill the user for
| the resources.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| if your onboarding is automated/nearly free
|
| and your costs track a certain number (e.g. number of
| checks/hosts)
|
| why would you bill per user?
|
| if you did all that and you have the right LTV and CAC
| numbers, at certain point you could basically run it on
| auto pilot
|
| billing per user, but maybe you have 1 power user in a
| team, and a few extra accounts for non tech/backup/etc,
| which login once a month to check something
| berryton wrote:
| I was reviewing git hosting prices this week and Gitlab pricing
| really didn't make sense. The cheapest paid plan doesn't provide
| enough incentive to the majority of people who just want to host
| small/personal projects.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| These changes will make it harder to use GitLab for many open
| source projects. Five acknowledged "users" (i.e. committers,
| reviewers, moderators etc.) over the sum total of projects in a
| single group/organization is not that much. They have a pre-
| existing Community Program for Open Source but the application
| process is overly complex and admittance is explicitly said to be
| at GitLab's discretion, not guaranteed (it also looks like the
| 'Community' status has to be periodically renewed), so it doesn't
| seem to be suitable as-is for many users who might otherwise want
| to host FLOSS code there.
| john_cogs wrote:
| The requirements to join the GitLab for Open Source program can
| be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-
| source/join/#require...
|
| They are:
|
| - OSI-approved open source license: All of the code you host in
| this GitLab group must be published under OSI-approved open
| source licenses
|
| - Not seeking profit: Your organization must not seek to make a
| profit through services or by charging for higher tiers.
| Accepting donations to sustain your efforts is ok. Read more
| about this requirement here:
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati...
|
| - Publicly visible: Your GitLab.com group or self-managed
| instance and your source code must be publicly visible and
| publicly available.
|
| GitLab's discretion means that we review applicants to ensure
| they meet these criteria and do not violate our CoC. The
| renewal helps us to ensure that our program members continue to
| meet these criteria.
| djbusby wrote:
| And keeps our open source company out :(
|
| We've got a FOSS project, use hosting and support services to
| pay staff to write MIT and GPL code. But because our model is
| nearly identical to GitLab model we cannot get the GitLab
| FOSS blessing. Is this irony?
| Vespasian wrote:
| I guess they want to keep the free tier primarily for
| personal use or companies evaluating the product.
|
| In this case it makes sense for them to apply these changes
| and other users will have to see whether it makes sense to
| pay for the service.
| jenny91 wrote:
| For those saying the GitLab for Open Source program will allow
| open source projects to have more than 5 members: I was involved
| in a project that was a part of that program. However, it
| requires yearly renewals and they somehow botched it at their end
| last time even though we signed all the documents. So bottom line
| is that we don't have it anymore.
| john_cogs wrote:
| Sorry to hear about this experience. I'd love to find out what
| happened and renew the license for your project. Feel free to
| email me jcoghlan at gitlab and I'll be happy to help.
| poink wrote:
| This will bite our startup. Regardless of the percentage
| affected, this seems to run counter to their previously-stated
| strategy of charging based on who wants a feature, and looks more
| like an attempt to purge large/unusually active projects similar
| to Vimeo's recent actions.
|
| Message received, I guess?
| mindwok wrote:
| Gitlab is probably the single enterprise software product I
| actually enjoy and advocate paying for. Decisions like this worry
| me about where they are headed.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Reminder that Gitlab's stock is down more than 50% of their all
| time high post IPO. I'd expect more pricing/feature changes as
| they try to improve revenue/EPS.
|
| Can an open core company survive a recession AND maintain their
| community/developer mind share?
| boringg wrote:
| In this market I'm not sure how their stock being down 50% is
| particularly relevant to the performance of the company.
| Investors bought in on ridiculous multiples when it IPOed and
| tech as a whole has been crushed with the change in macro
| economic conditions. Less to do with their model more to do
| with the market. That said I am sure there is lots more
| internal pressure to drive revenue.
|
| Your second part of the statement seems more relevant.
| prepend wrote:
| The market isn't down 50%. So it's relevant because GitLab is
| performing worse than the market and worse than other
| companies.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| for reference: https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-
| release-details/git...
|
| They're still rapidly growing but they're loosing their edge to
| Github who since being acquired by Microsoft can afford to play
| the long game and give away more at a better price point.
| boringg wrote:
| Exactly - MSFT can pay higher CAC and they are trying to keep
| them in their services as a whole not strictly GitHub
| related. Slightly different goals and pockets.
| bdcravens wrote:
| For years their advantage was CI and free private repos. They
| didn't have much of a moat.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I wanted to pay GitLab for my personal project space (I prefer to
| be a customer!) but their prices are too steep for such flippant
| use. I otherwise like their product, it's just that the pricing
| model doesn't well fit my use case.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| JetBrains, the company behind Android Studio and many other IDEs,
| has "Spaces", basically MS Team clone with free unlimited Git and
| other developer-centric stuff (https://www.jetbrains.com/space/).
| maxloh wrote:
| Unfortunately, it is not open source :(
| josephcsible wrote:
| Since GitLab for Open Source isn't affected, who will actually be
| affected by this in practice?
| LeSaucy wrote:
| People who were relying on Gitlab the company to provide free
| tier access to hosted gitlab instances (as opposed to those who
| host gitlab themselves)
| josephcsible wrote:
| But doesn't GitLab for Open Source exist on the hosted one?
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| "GitLab for Open Source" is a program that requires an
| application as well as occasional renewal.
|
| So, all the open source projects who choose not to do that for
| various reasons, small teams and businesses, hobbyist projects
| like hackathons which generally have more than 5 people to a
| team.
|
| You know, just off the top of my head.
| philpem wrote:
| I'm grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, but
| this seems ludicrous.
|
| My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some
| bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical
| year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket
| sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is
| only available to registered charities in my country, so we're
| forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That
| puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab
| is joining that list.
|
| So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* --
| which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total
| IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves
| ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the
| event.
|
| Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see
| us using is Epics.
|
| To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user,
| per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still
| going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as
| $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that).
|
| The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good
| feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the
| bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going
| away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting
| from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your
| custom".
|
| As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the
| golden goose.
|
| If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free
| tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me
| over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially
| if the price was the same as Github.
|
| Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI
| minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Github is free for teams, $48 is the team plan, but you can use
| the free plan with an organisation of any number of users
| snapetom wrote:
| I was in the same boat with another organization. We needed
| some light computing resources, but didn't have the money for
| it. We eventually just went ahead and created a foundation to
| officially be a non-profit and qualify for stuff. It's a
| hassle, but it was worth it. Honestly a $8000 budget is plenty
| to justify doing this.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| They keep changing this, can they make up their minds?
|
| I'd rather self-host anyway. I use Gitea but it is kind of
| limited. Gitlab (self hosted) otoh is a horrendous resource pig
|
| Is there something suitable for self hosting that's not such
| bloat? What does Gitlab bring that's difficult to self-host?
| packetlost wrote:
| Sourcehut?
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| Interesting, I had thought of that as just another hosting
| service. Thanks, I will look into it further. I see that it
| is written in Go. Not my preference, but Gitea also is, so it
| is ok.
|
| I wonder whether bug tracking can or should simply be folded
| into Git, so the tracker would be distributed just as the
| source control is.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| 0x0 wrote:
| It's a shame to see them price themselves out of several markets.
| In the "agency" model of work, there will be many users that very
| rarely connect, while there is a much smaller core group of
| active developers. Impossible to justify paying the full price
| per month when all these barely-active users count as full users.
| For years the free tier was good enough, but while wanting to pay
| them, the lowest priced paid tier was too pricey to make sense.
| Feels like they are leaving money on the table, and now they are
| also pushing away people who previously would be championing and
| advocating for their product and service.
| qeternity wrote:
| Don't worry, just switch to a paid. With Gitlab's atrocious
| uptime and reliability, you'll be getting your entire monthly
| payment back in SLA credit.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I can't believe the number of entitled posts here. Do people here
| think that Gitlab SaaS doesn't have an operation cost (in
| servers, development, support, etc)?
|
| Perhaps people need to start re-evaluating what "free" means in
| the context of a cloud offering. "Free" is a marketing strategy,
| not a charitable act.
|
| In the case of Gitlab there's nothing preventing you from using
| the self-managed free tier which will effectively remove this
| limit, but guess what? Running it on your own will also have a
| cost for you. The same way it does for Gitlab when they give it
| for free through Gitlab.com
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| Not entitlement
|
| Gitlab used to have a basic free tier and a 5$ tier which was
| accessible
|
| Since they will heavily restrict the free tier, and the 5$ plan
| was moved to 20$, many organizations have a serious financial
| decision to make
|
| and all the fans of Gitlab, myself included, will have to
| consider options
|
| and the other problem is pricing/per seat billing, is difficult
| for everyone, of course. But surely there's plenty of
| organizations which are probably a lot cheaper for Gitlab to
| keep as users than others depending on feature usage.
| benatkin wrote:
| I read every single top-level comment, and not a single one
| seems "entitled" to me.
| Dayshine wrote:
| I used to run Jira Server myself for a hobby project, I paid
| $10 for the 10 user version. I guess I might have been able to
| stretch to $50 out of my personal funds.
|
| Guess what? They dropped support and the suggested replacement
| product costs thousands per year.
|
| Am I entitled in that case too?
|
| Small non-commercial projects get stepped on all the time
| despite contributing most of the important software in the
| world.
|
| GitLab recently upped their pricing from $5/m to $20/m as well,
| so even paying members got a huge price increase.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Interesting announcement, didn't expect it. I respect the
| decision but it will force me to consider another git host
| provider. I've always been willing to pay for Gitlab but the
| prices have always been aggressive and discouraged me from doing
| it:
|
| - $20/per user for most basic tier when I don't really need any
| of the features offered (except maybe "approval before merge
| required")
|
| - $5/month for 10GB of storage ($0.50/GB) is steep. This stopped
| me from importing my large Git LFS project
|
| - No way to have "view only" members for a repo or issue board
| without it contributing to your user number count and having to
| pay full price for them.
|
| It's clear that I'm not that target market for them which is fine
| but its a bit of a shame as I do like gitlab.
| bob1029 wrote:
| $20/user/m is ridiculous. We are looking at paying a tiny bit
| more than this to have Github Enterprise hosted on our own
| hardware.
| karakanb wrote:
| Considering that GitHub is priced at $4 per user/month, I
| really cannot justify paying 5x of that amount, especially
| without even using any of the features in the paid tier. I
| really like the product, but I am going to have to look for
| other options.
| 11235813213455 wrote:
| Github can be free for teams: https://github.com/pricing.html
| laughingpine wrote:
| The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their
| pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user
| licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user
| counts to afford the new licence.
|
| There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role
| based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for
| commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the
| product to its full extent.
|
| I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment
| models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look
| at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features,
| it is a very hard sell.
| stavros wrote:
| Same, we have 50 people who access some (private)
| documentation and 10 people who use the repos. We're going to
| be moving away tomorrow.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| This is a problem at every org scale as well. We have this
| issue with a 1000+ developer org where we still can't give
| our PMs and other non-developers read-only access to the
| gitlab issues because it would be another 200 headcount worth
| of full-price licenses. It's basically the sole reason we
| can't utilize most of their jira/confluence alternative
| product line and still keep issue tracking and docs mostly
| outside of gitlab.
| z3t4 wrote:
| If you are just using the .git hosting part, it would be
| really easy to setup an open-ssh server yourself... Could
| you explain why you are not hosting your own ssh server
| already ?
| lolinder wrote:
| They didn't say they're only using the git hosting,
| they're just not using the issue trackers because that
| would require adding non-devs. For all you know they
| could be using GitLab for CI, merge requests, package
| management, and deployments, none of which require adding
| new people to the team.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| Exactly this, we use it for all of those things. None of
| which provide value to PMs, designers, and other non-
| engineer roles within teams that still need to
| collaborate on issue tracking and documentation.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| We're light users of Gitlab, just use it for Merge Requests and
| the CI interface (while we use our own runners)
|
| The cheapest plan is 19$ month and it doesn't give us any extra
| benefits
|
| and it's billed annually! Take it or leave it. For me it's 3
| months timeline to leave Gitlab :)
|
| I still like it, but not worthwhile for my professional
| projects and Github is a better homepage with all my OSS
| contributions displayed.
|
| beside there's always a couple of people (non tech) who get
| added to the repo and barely login (but they want to keep the
| access), not worth paying 19$ for that
| lerela wrote:
| As others have pointed out, $19/user/month is just not an option
| for many small teams, especially with non-western costs.
|
| I guess we'll start planning the migration but it's really
| disappointing not to be able to pay a _reasonable_ fee and then
| be kicked out on a 3-months notice.
|
| I've seen complaints about this business model for a while on HN
| but never got the chance to understand Gitlab's reasoning for
| sticking to this pricing.
| adamc wrote:
| Just fuels my cynicism about "free" offerings. Sooner or later,
| companies decide they want to monetize as much as possible.
|
| I'm not saying it's unfair. But it makes me less interested in
| trying things just because they are "free".
| nicce wrote:
| The current trend seems to be that sadly. You offer your
| services for free or for reduced price. Once you got enough
| users, you start taking all the money you can get.
| swearwolf wrote:
| If a company offers a free tier and a paid tier of their
| product, and the free tier is sufficiently useful, you can bet
| their salespeople hate it. Even when it's the thing driving
| customers to their platform in the first place. They see it as
| unnecessary competition. While sales leadership may not be the
| most important people in the org chart, sales focused thinking
| permeates executive culture. Sooner or later, the that free
| tier will end up in their crosshairs. Some companies have the
| discipline to hold out longer, but when quarterly performance
| is at risk, it's only a matter of time.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| Fortunately, GitLab is open core, and I have only used the
| features in it that are available as Open Source, so if I need
| to migrate, I can migrate to my own, self-host, system. And
| that is why I avoid free offerings that aren't open source. I
| also avoid paying for non-open source saas... because you never
| know when they will raise the price or make other changes that
| make it no longer work for you.
|
| Moral of the story is- use and buy open source! Not open core.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Someone has to maintain that software. Doesn't matter if it's
| open source, open core, or paid, someone has to maintain it.
| Just because something may not be open source doesn't mean
| you should shy away from it, on the contrary it might be
| better supported in the long run than an open source project
| that doesn't have a monetization/support model. People want
| to get paid for their work, this notion of OSS maintainers
| being saints who work for free may fly for small hobby
| projects, but once shit gets real and folks are slamming you
| for bug/feature requests it gets old, fast.
| ensignavenger wrote:
| I specifically mentioned paying for Open Source.
| Dayshine wrote:
| This is really disappointing.
|
| I've always encouraged small non-commercial hobby projects to use
| GitLab. It just seemed like the right thing to do.
|
| If you're familiar with Paradox Interactive Studios games
| (Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris):
|
| - Star Trek: New Horizons (127,000 current subscribers)
|
| - SW:Fallen Republic (97,000 current subscribers)
|
| - Kaiserreich (774,000 current subscribers)
|
| are (/were) all hosted on GitLab.
|
| A lot of the people who contribute to these projects only do so
| intermittently (so high member count to work done ratio) and are
| usually doing this in their formative years so would be likely to
| continue to use GitLab when they enter the working world.
|
| There is absolutely no money available as game publishers
| prohibit it. And even if they tried to sneak in some Patreon
| donations there's no way that's going to cover $19/m/user!
|
| Honestly, GitLab really seems to be falling far behind in their
| outreach. Their Open source programme is behind GitHub's and they
| don't have anything for Non-profits.
| rsstack wrote:
| > This change does not apply to our other plans: ... GitLab for
| Open Source
|
| Doesn't that solve the issue for those projects?
| Dayshine wrote:
| Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have
| copyright on the original game files.
|
| Another problem is that game mods are often developed in
| private repos to prevent ideas and assets being "stolen" by
| other projects. There are no lawyers to protect your IP in
| the non-commercial world.
|
| It's taken decades for the commercial world to even vaguely
| become OK with source available, let alone open source, we
| can't really expect teenagers and young adults who weren't
| trained as software developers to be comfortable with it.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| > Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have
| copyright on the original game files.
|
| Don't most game mods simply patch the executable if there's
| no mod framework available? I would think that the patch
| engine and specific patches aren't violating the original
| game's copyright, simply because they wouldn't contain any
| of the game's assets or code (aside from maybe memory
| addresses and executable names for hooking)
| Dayshine wrote:
| There usually is a mod framework available, and in
| paradox games you often use the base game's script files
| as a starting point.
|
| The point is generally irrelevant though, as a condition
| of uploading a mod to Steam or the game's mod system will
| be to give unconditional usage rights to the publisher
| which is incompatible with FOSS.
| kuang_eleven wrote:
| In that licensing case, a mod project could dual-license
| with both a license that conforms to the requirements for
| mod distribution and an open-source license, although
| this would complicate the efforts of any derivative code
| who might want to distribute.
|
| That being said, mod authors seem _weirdly_ defensive and
| secretive about their code and ideas; I think it would be
| a hard sell to get most of them to use an open-source
| license even if it were possible.
| rsstack wrote:
| Fair point. TIL :)
| eslaught wrote:
| First off, I'm really grateful for the service Gitlab has
| provided to date, both to the open source community and to Git
| users at large.
|
| Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose.
|
| At one point, Gitlab's competitive advantage was relatively
| generous free access to private Git repos. This generated a lot
| of goodwill in the days when GitHub didn't provide private repos
| even for personal use. I'm guessing that Gitlab now views its
| competitive advantage as the CI / DevOps experience. Still, it
| feels to me like they could limit that feature specifically
| rather than limiting even _public_ projects to 5 users. Right
| now, GitHub 's offering is suddenly looking attractive again for
| anyone who doesn't want to fill out a separate application
| (annually!) for each of their open source namespaces.
|
| I'd think it's to Gitlab's advantage to keep these users. Right
| now, the current policy effectively chases them away. The only
| projects I imagine staying are those that really take advantage
| of the CI, but... is that really who Gitlab wants to limit their
| userbase to?
| mdoms wrote:
| If your "competitive advantage" costs you money for every
| customer acquisition is it really an advantage?
| eslaught wrote:
| It depends on whether that cost is higher or lower than the
| value you get from paying customers (plus goodwill)---i.e.,
| it's a customer acquisition cost. And whether this particular
| method of customer acquisition is more or less cost-effective
| than other methods.
|
| Since they're doing this, I assume they've done the analysis
| and determined this is no longer cost effective for them. But
| I'm surprised, because (a) they'll lose goodwill, and (b)
| what's their alternative plan for customer acquisition? I
| don't think Gitlab has grown to the point where they can
| afford to cut their growth, but I don't see how they're going
| to avoid that on the path they're going down.
| mdoms wrote:
| Just got off the phone with AWS, they say no they won't
| take payment in "customer good will"???
| altdataseller wrote:
| AWS literally gives a lot of startups 1-2 years of free
| credits.
| eslaught wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're saying. AWS literally has a free
| tier. They're playing the same game as Gitlab, and part
| of that is paying for potential customers to get access
| to a baseline level of service to grow their experience
| with the product and generate goodwill.
|
| I don't have any inside details, but I'd suspect that AWS
| also pays for PR, either through an internal team or
| external vendors. So "customer goodwill" is (probably)
| something they pay money for. Real dollars. This isn't
| free; you have to pay for it somehow. Whether it's
| dollars to fund a PR team (and the whole funnel of
| marketing/sales/etc.), or through free tiers designed to
| spread by word of mouth... you can't expect to acquire
| customers for free.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| You can use their CI "system" (the nice interface + config
| file) without using their CI runners (probably the biggest
| cost portion in the solution)
|
| Bundling CI minutes on the paid plan doesn't change much, as
| plenty of customers will keep running their own CI runners
| for a variety of reasons.
|
| Which means they're essentially very cheap users of Gitlab or
| would otherwise consider cheaper plans like 5$ a month
| stavros wrote:
| Oof, I agree. I'm trying to move our repos in my current
| company from Github to GitLab and was using the free tier to
| move repos one by one until I could convince enough people that
| we get enough value out of it to pay and switch over.
|
| Now there's no chance of that happening, as we aren't going to
| pay for both, and we aren't going to switch wholesale, so it's
| looking that I'm going to have to move everything to Github...
| xtracto wrote:
| At a previous company I (Head of Engineering) was pushing to
| move from Github to Gitlab. However it was exactly at the
| time when Gitlab removed their lower price tier (I think $5
| or $10 per user) and butchered the free version. In addition
| to that, they do not allow monthly payment (only yearly pre-
| payment), which was incompatible with our business.
|
| We were actually a Github paying customer and were going to
| pay to move to Gitlab, but given all those changes and rug-
| pulls, we decided to stay in Github. GH actions resulted to
| be enough for the CI/CD stuff we needed.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose.
|
| I think it might signal another thing too: "We're big enough,
| so we don't need that booster anymore".
|
| Trello did that back then. They provided a middle tier called
| Gold which gave personal users all the goodies, sans the
| enterprise features. When they got big enough, they moved to
| strip it out and everybody (incl. me) were up in arms.
|
| We've agreed in a trade-off, and then they still moved us
| gradually to enterprise. Now we're all using "Team of One"
| professional accounts with $99/yr. price tags. Trello is an
| enterprise platform and we're using it expensively just because
| we are a bunch of people who can use Kanban boards with katana-
| like precision for our personal projects and/or workflows.
|
| GitLab might be doing this move to position themselves for
| bigger customers. Knowledgeable people can either pay, or use
| self-hosted versions they may think. Also, self hosted GitLab
| has evolved from a simple GitHub clone to a complete pipeline
| solution with extremely powerful functions. Even GitLab SaaS
| can talk with your in-house runners, so you can have an on-
| premise CI/CD pipeline with cloud frontend. It's kinda crazy.
|
| Either like it or not, but you can't burn money like Microsoft
| + GitHub for free tier.
| awill wrote:
| If your free tier customers are costing you a lot of money,
| you're going it wrong.
| RF_Savage wrote:
| Gitlab had continuing problems with people using the free
| CI service for crypto mining. It seems to be the bane of
| all services that offer any kind of free tier for any
| compute.
| fnord123 wrote:
| Which Trello features are you paying for? I use it a lot for
| personal organization but not the paid tier. Curious what I'm
| missing or if there's an implication of a feature I didn't
| understand.
| bayindirh wrote:
| I'm paying for the $10/mo. tier. The features I actively
| use are:
|
| - Saved searches.
|
| - Single board guests.
|
| - Calendar, Dashboard and (rarely) Timeline views.
|
| - Custom fields
|
| - A lot of butler automations.
|
| - A lot of power-ups, esp. Evernote, Dropbox, GitHub (it
| was limited before, so looks like they rolled gold into
| free somewhat).
| bovermyer wrote:
| I don't really have a big problem with this, but in a weird
| coincidence, I just decided this morning to spin up a self-hosted
| instance of GitLab and migrate all of my GitHub and GitLab
| repositories to it.
|
| This just adds a little impetus to that decision.
| ProAm wrote:
| How difficult was that spin up? Ive been wanting to play with
| it. Are you hosting on a VPS somewhere?
| literallyWTF wrote:
| Surprised they're not also shipping a major version that
| deprecates a bunch of shit. Gitlab is so nice to use, but then
| they decide to release a bunch of new crap, change everything,
| and then jack up the price.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Tale as old as time. Give a free tier to get people to store
| their data with you and then pull the rug when they're too
| committed to leave. Should be illegal.
| Jxl180 wrote:
| Git is distributed. Just change the remote to GitHub or a
| different VCS and the full commit history will be pushed as
| well.
| bdcravens wrote:
| You lose the non-git history (discussions, PR context,
| issues, etc) as well as CI. If it was just commits, git is
| easily installed.
| naetd wrote:
| Interesting that Github has been getting slammed by people upset
| with the outages, but it doesn't seem like there's much movement
| towards Gitlab as an alternative.
|
| I use both near-daily for different clients and I have grown to
| prefer Gitlabs... the price is higher, but it might be worth it
| to some of the people in the daily HN github issue threads (eg
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 )
| tssva wrote:
| Possibly because Gitlab doesn't have any better record
| regarding outages.
| PaywallBuster wrote:
| Just sharing, there's also a few providers selling "Hosted
| Gitlab" solutions
|
| so you may find a better deal than "pay-per-seat gitlab.com"
| without the inconvenience of self hosting
|
| Example
|
| https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/
| tommoor wrote:
| I suppose it's easy to be cheaper when you don't pay for any of
| the R&D
| ipaddr wrote:
| What goes around comes around. Building a business off of
| git. Then someone builds a product off of your product.
| asp_hornet wrote:
| I remember when Microsoft purchased Github and there was a mass
| exodus to Gitlab because they were so sure "M$" would
| commercialise and ruin GitHub.
|
| MS ended up moving offerings from their paid tier to the free
| tier and Gitlab decided to offer this.
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