[HN Gopher] Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups
___________________________________________________________________
Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups
Author : MattIPv4
Score : 135 points
Date : 2023-06-20 17:14 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.gitlab.com)
| mirzap wrote:
| I'm incredibly pleased about Microsoft's acquisition of Github,
| as I notice visible improvements every passing month. Considering
| Gitlab's pricing, I wonder why anyone would abandon GitHub Team
| or Enterprise plan in favor of Gitlab. Gitlab's costs are
| exorbitant, and they resemble Atlassian products, with an
| overwhelming number of features that are rarely used, cluttering
| the interface and diminishing the overall user experience.
| brightball wrote:
| IMO Gitlab's offering is far more comprehensive and can't
| really be an apples to apples comparison.
|
| Plus, I greatly appreciate the transparency of many of the
| features that Gitlab sells around security outlining exactly
| which open source tools they use so that you can just go do it
| yourself on the CI pipeline. The real value for the premium
| security tier is when you have a team coordinating multiple
| projects.
|
| I've seen Github try to upsell to enterprise with features that
| I can just install in a few minutes using the tools that Gitlab
| tells me about.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I dunno, gitlab looks more comprehensive if you just look at
| a checklist "do they have feature X, Y, Z?" but if you look
| at depth and quality of implementation a lot of their
| features fall apart. Even issues, which seem like one of the
| top 4 things they do (git, MRs, CI, issues) are fine for
| simple stuff but fall apart after that (Have you ever wanted
| to search for an issue based on something mentioned in a
| comment on it? Good luck!).
|
| They're also buggy, and in my experience I keep hitting bugs
| that are long-tail and therefore never prioritized to
| actually fix.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| Well said and matches my experience as well. A breadth of
| features but once you start actively using them in depth
| you find that the experience is not as polished.
| yuumei wrote:
| I guess you are on Windows then. After Microsoft there are more
| and more UI bugs creeping in to Firefox
| nhumrich wrote:
| I still use gitlab primarily because of the CI system. Still
| haven't found any competitors that are as easy to use and
| integrated as gitlab CI. Github actions are still lagging far
| behind.
| Scotrix wrote:
| same here, package/docker registry + ci/cd are just simple
| and easy to use, all the other features I really don't care
| about...
| bipson wrote:
| To be fair, this has changed considerably over the last 10
| years.
|
| GitLab was drastically cheaper, offering free private repos,
| and interesting features ahead of GitHub (although IMO always
| slightly less "sexy" than GitHub, using Ruby on Rails, etc.).
|
| But at the time they gathered (1) serious funding money and (2)
| influx from MS-asylants their priorities started to change. But
| they were still the cheaper option for quite some time IIRC.
| The pandemic and the associated gold-rush/growth in IT pushed
| the dynamics over the edge I think.
|
| Now their position is not really that different from GitHub's,
| and I think it is kind of a preference thing.
|
| I can do with both, but I kind of still like the appeal and UX
| in GitHub. GitLab will always be in my heart, just like ever
| "Underdog" (even if that was a long time ago).
|
| I could further see myself immediately falling for a _third_
| alternative, if it was sexy /unique enough with drastically
| better UX, and I think that is not even too far fetched.
|
| But there is the thing, GitHub is a platform, not (just) a
| tool. GitLab still managed to take ground - kudos! That would
| be the hard part.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| We're in the process of switching from Atlassian to GitHub.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| I am not pleased with Microsoft. Yes, there have been some
| improvements. But GitHub Actions is very half baked, yet the
| bean counters at my company are asking "why do we pay for
| buildkite?". It feels like they are using the same playbook as
| MS Teams.
| simooooo wrote:
| What's half baked about it?
| jshier wrote:
| One area is its reusability story. Last I looked you
| couldn't create reusable actions in the same repo you want
| to call them from, they have to be in an external repo. For
| quite a while, private reusable actions were an Enterprise-
| only feature, but that may have been lifted now. The
| ability to reuse particular jobs is also missing, and
| communication among jobs is limited to variables after the
| fact. You can only use success or failure states to trigger
| other jobs, you can't pass values.
| RussianCow wrote:
| > Last I looked you couldn't create reusable actions in
| the same repo you want to call them from, they have to be
| in an external repo.
|
| I'm not sure if/when this changed, but you can definitely
| do this now.
|
| > You can only use success or failure states to trigger
| other jobs, you can't pass values.
|
| This is also not true: you can pipe environment variables
| to $GITHUB_OUTPUT which can be referenced by future jobs.
|
| If anything, the main issue with GitHub Actions is that
| it's confusing, and the docs don't make it easy to
| understand how to do things at a high level.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| forgive me if my information is outdated, but:
|
| - You can't retry a failed action, be it manually in the UI
| or automatically under certain conditions.
|
| - workflows have a pretty low limit for number of jobs -
| 250 or so. We already split our rspec tests across 300
| parallel jobs.
|
| - the UX is full of jank. If I click into an in-progress
| jobs I often can't see prior logs for the in-progress step
| until the step completes.
|
| There are also some annoyances that aren't really half-
| baked, but annoying for Monorepos:
|
| - workflows have to be defined under the .github folder.
| This means workflows can't be collocated with the code they
| relate to.
|
| - workflows can't be generated dynamically. At best, you
| can dynamically trigger predefined workflows, but I don't
| think they get associated with the PR that triggered them.
| This makes patterns like dynamically dispatching workflows
| based on, say, a bazel query for affected rdeps more
| challenging, if not entirely infeasible.
| cpuguy83 wrote:
| You can retry failed jobs these days (for awhile now, at
| least a year? I can't remember).
|
| Workflows can also be (sort of, depending on what you
| mean?) dynamically generated by using tojson and fromjson
| to feed the output of one job into a matrix.
|
| Full disclosure, I work at Microsoft but nothing to do
| with GitHub.
| umvi wrote:
| GitHub Actions seems turing complete to me (meaning, I can do
| anything I can dream up)
| duped wrote:
| It invokes arbitrary shell scripts, so who cares?
| dijit wrote:
| To be trite; Jenkins is then equivalent?
|
| CSS can famously be made turing complete.
|
| https://notlaura.com/is-css-turing-complete/
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm not. The biggest enemy of Linux/FOSS should never have been
| in charge of the biggest repository of open source software.
| EduardoBautista wrote:
| Microsoft earns a significant amount of money from hosting
| Linux servers and even makes contributions to the kernel.
|
| How are they an enemy?
| orangepurple wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20050922005808/http://news.zdne
| t...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180523190053/https://www.econ
| o...
| arp242 wrote:
| This is more than 20 years old...
| jacquesm wrote:
| So is Microsoft. And everybody that is currently
| controlling the company was there when this happened.
| arp242 wrote:
| And? Are they still doing this kind of stuff or not? If
| they are, then it would be easy to come up with more
| recent examples.
| hoherd wrote:
| FYI they also acquired NPM. https://itsfoss.com/microsoft-
| npm-acquisition
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> The biggest enemy of Linux /FOSS_
|
| Have they outdone Oracle? Impressive! :)
|
| On a serious note, is your comment based on historical or
| recent events?
| dingnuts wrote:
| It doesn't matter, the only difference between Nadella era
| and Ballmer or Gates era is marketing. It's the same
| Microsoft that it's always been.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > is your comment based on historical or recent events?
|
| Why would I need to choose between those two? How about
| 'both'?
| tough wrote:
| For the historical you have all the EEE tactics https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...
|
| For recent events, you could look at stuff how VSCode is
| supposedly Open Source and yet fully ridded with spyware
| and also propietary plugins...
|
| On github, having MS at the realm has certainly affected
| too how DMCA's and such are deal with vs the old Github.
| gtirloni wrote:
| The VSCode situation could be improved but isn't there
| VSCodium to remediate that?
|
| As for DMCA, I think you have to talk to the government
| officials about how badly it works.
|
| Are there any other recent events that I'm forgetting
| that make MSFT the biggest enemy of FOSS?
| deciplex wrote:
| He gave you a recent event and you conceded the point
| then suggested he use something else.
|
| And, DMCA is bad law but many companies make it worse in
| their overzealousness to "comply" with it.
| tough wrote:
| I also couldn't find sources to care to respond to him
| but I remember about some little terminal app which FOSS
| code was basically stolen by MS from the indie dev and
| then he was gaslighted about it. I can't find the source
| in reddit thanks to the going dark thing now lmao. Can't
| find it now, so maybe I hallucinated it better than some
| fine LLM's
|
| If anyone else remembers this incident and can link to a
| source that'd be great for my sanity.
|
| Maybe similar to this:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17214257
|
| I do have a love-hate relationship with MS, but I don't
| love the fact that they own 80% of my stack (Yes, I know,
| my choice) between TypeScript, VSCode, NPM, Github, etc..
|
| Also on VSCodium, it only fixes the telemetry bullshit,
| the custom LSP Plugins that microsoft keeps for
| themselves or whatever are not available there. so If you
| want to use for example copilot or other -microsoft
| official- plugins you can't do so on VSCodium
|
| Also let's add the whole Github Copilot WhiteWashing non-
| FOSS proprietary code into anyone to steal. Basically
| breaking the current status quo in favour of the
| megacorps that can steal it all and respect no licenses
| pentium166 wrote:
| > If anyone else remembers this incident and can link to
| a source that'd be great for my sanity.
|
| This incident was Casey Muratori raising an issue about
| Windows Terminal performance:
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/10362
|
| https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1522471966929653761
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687287343&dateRange=cust
| om&...
| tough wrote:
| Yes thank you this is what I meant, I also actually
| remembered about AppGet pointed by a sibling comment.
|
| I wouldn't trust MS with my business as an indie dev,
| that's all
|
| And I wouldn't trust their -true- intentions on FOSS
| beyond how their incentives align currently with the
| space
| 6c696e7578 wrote:
| Couldn't find what you were looking for, but did find
| this one:
| https://www.itprotoday.com/windows-78/inside-story-how-
| microsofts-open-source-code-theft-was-discovered
| ayewo wrote:
| You might have been thinking of AppGet which got killed
| by Microsoft's WinGet
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331287
| tough wrote:
| Yes thank you also had seen this one but didn't remember
| the specifics, there's so many cases it's wild.
| gtirloni wrote:
| _> He gave you a recent event and you conceded the point
| then suggested he use something else._
|
| Not really. It was a good point but it wasn't clearcut.
|
| Of course I don't think the VScode situation is great but
| it's far from being "the biggest enemy of FOSS".
|
| That's why I was wondering if there were any other recent
| events. I've not been keeping track, truly.
| tough wrote:
| I think there's enough recent events pointed by other
| commenters to at least be able to say with certain grade
| of truth to it that Microsoft isn't the biggest friend of
| FOSS as much as they pretend to be with stuff like WSL or
| whatever
| teddyh wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29579994
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > The VSCode situation could be improved but isn't there
| VSCodium to remediate that?
|
| That's a great example, actually, because they'd like you
| to think that VSCode is open source... but then if you
| actually use that you can't access a rather lot of the
| most useful extensions, which is a completely artificial
| limitation that appears to be there only to prevent
| people from actually using any fork.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| VSCodium is specifically incompatible with Microsoft's
| proprietary extensions like SSH development, and now the
| official VS Code Python extension has now switched to a
| _proprietary_ Pylance language server.
| Hamuko wrote:
| It's actually fucking crazy how expensive GitLab is in
| comparison to GitHub.
|
| Let's say we have 40 employees who code and 30 employees who
| create tickets, and we want to get all of the security scanning
| features that the platform has to offer.
|
| For GitLab, we need the $99/user/month plan because the
| security features are only available in that subscription.
| Guest users are completely free, but they're extremely gimped
| when it comes to issues, so most likely you'll have to have
| most if not all of your non-coding employees at the
| $99/user/month tier. Final price is $6930/month (or $3960/month
| if you can really handle the gimped guests).
|
| For GitHub, you need to pay $19.25/user/month plan for every
| user and $49/month for every person that commits code for the
| security features. So that's $1347.50/month for user accounts
| and $1960 for security features for a total of $3307.50/month.
|
| GitHub is not even half what GitLab wants. It's even less than
| the gimped guest user experience that you can subject yourself
| to with GitLab.
| bombela wrote:
| The UI keeps bloating, lagging more and more. It can now take
| few seconds to load a few thousand line file for display.
|
| Ctrl-f search doesn't work anymore because it lazy loads the
| file as you scroll, with a very noticable lag at that.
|
| Some repos are inexplicably limited to 50KiB/s.
|
| And yes I have a powerful computer, very good Internet
| connection with low latency to GitHub.
| neilv wrote:
| > _A five-user limit applies to newly created top-level
| namespaces with private visibility on GitLab SaaS_
|
| Any idea whether they'll eventually chip away at _public-
| visibility open source projects_?
|
| "We're not Microsoft" might be GitLab's biggest remaining selling
| point. And the more savvy open source developers might care
| disproportionately about that. I'd think GitLab might be trying
| to _lure_ open source, now that GitHub isn 't the warm-fuzzy
| company that originally landed a lot of it, yet GitHub continues
| to be the de facto official provider for most major open source
| projects and ecosystems. Plus that has network effects for
| landing paying customers. Has GitLab given up on that?
|
| BTW, I'm fine with GitLab charging for non-open-source commercial
| projects. If your startup has more than 5 users, you probably
| already have salaries in your burn rate, and GitLab is a
| relatively small cost, for a critical service. (See: TLC's "No
| Scrubs".) I've happily paid for GitLab in earlier-stage startups.
| dataminded wrote:
| IT tried to get us to migrate to Gitlab in a past life, it went
| absolutely nowhere. Gitlab is stupidly expensive and complicated
| for value that never realized.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Question for Gitlab: Why did you collect an email address from
| the user in the first place? Why does it exist in your db?
|
| Now explain why it was not used for it's only legitimate reason
| for existing in your posession, _first_ , let alone followed up
| with a few updates as the deadline got closer.
|
| You have a communication channel that not only is good for this,
| but exists for this exact sole purpose in the first place. If you
| aren't going to use it for that, then you have no legitimate
| reason to have it and I want you to delete it.
| zachruss92 wrote:
| This bait-and-switch along with real uptime issues is why I left
| GitLab years ago. I have a personal rule of; "if there is a
| reasonable OSS alternative to a proprietary software, use it."
| Unfortunately they are not reasonable. I was even a a paying
| customer but they changed their pricing structure so many times
| and moved features around for different tiers I couldn't justify
| it as a business.
|
| I've been happy moving back to GitHub post Microsoft acquisition.
| If I ever got fed up with GitHub I find Gitea to be refreshingly
| simple and does basically everything I need.
|
| I do wish the best for GitLab though and am rooting for them. Any
| company that makes an OSS model work is one worth having hope
| for.
| pierat wrote:
| This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to
| Gitlab you install on your hardware.
|
| I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money.
|
| A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies.
| They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity
| with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays
| free.
|
| (This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false
| and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of
| "free".)
|
| Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs:
| https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
| kobalsky wrote:
| > And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.
|
| or they use "free" to nuke competitors from orbit, salt the
| ground to ensure nobody can get a dime for a decade in this
| industry, hoard all the expertise then increase your pricing by
| orders of magnitude like it happened with Google Maps.
| pierat wrote:
| We used to enforce monopoly regulations, and similar types of
| anticompetitive behaviors that kill swaths of markets. And
| that's exactly what happened with what you described with
| Google maps.
|
| This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower
| the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all
| competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the
| prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of
| money, from people with no choice.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
|
| The last big antitrust push we had was against Microsoft. And
| after the judge was replaced for improper communication
| during trial, MS and DoJ settled. Basically, was a huge case
| then "Oops nevermind".
| [deleted]
| reducesuffering wrote:
| Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run.
| It is more productive for society to give away limited product
| offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent
| into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns.
|
| If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be
| great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and
| everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product
| usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or
| astroturfing here (no bearing on product)
| pierat wrote:
| You can excuse or justify it however you want. But it's still
| false and deceptive advertising to use "free" in situations
| like this.
|
| To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying
| something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time
| as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying
| in data.
|
| Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license,
| which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I
| could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that
| statement.
| freedomben wrote:
| instead of "free" what term/expression should the company
| use for their "free" tier?
| sigg3 wrote:
| Demo or freeware.
|
| Personally I prefer demo, because it's a demonstration of
| what you can expect.
| freedomben wrote:
| Demo is interesting, although it nearly always implies
| limited functionality and/or limited timeframe you can
| use the software, which may be misleading for some free
| tiers.
|
| Freeware could be a good term, but wouldn't it still have
| the same nothing-is-free issue that GP brought up calling
| it "false and deceptive advertising"? The term certainly
| doesn't connote the "why" behind the offering
| freedomben wrote:
| The real world is way more nuanced than this. Many "free"
| offerings are not monetization through ads or likewise, they
| are marketing strategies, and they're good for both company and
| consumers as they allow evaluation periods with no committment,
| and in some cases use the business/enterprise revenue to
| subsidize individual users, which benefits individual users.
| deely3 wrote:
| Agreed. And they should be marketed as 'temporary free',
| 'limited free' not as 'free'.
| wruza wrote:
| Shouldn't paid plans then be "temporary $4,95"? I mean,
| they still can screw you with "$5,45" any time.
| bhauer wrote:
| The key mitigating factor here when comparing to GitHub: GitLab
| is self-hostable, and in the self-hosted version has no user
| limits.
|
| The limit discussed here only applied to the instance hosted by
| GitLab.
| rhaway84773 wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone uses Gitlab anymore. In stark
| contrast to GitHub, it's been an exercise in promising features
| which are then taken away from you, for years.
|
| Gitlab is almost certainly the most unethical company I've ever
| seen.
| abeppu wrote:
| I find their use of the word "subgroup" here to be annoying,
| because a subgroup under their semantics "inherits" members from
| the group it's included in, i.e. the cardinality of a subgroup is
| _larger_ than the cardinality of its parent.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| At least it does not seem to affect the self hosted community
| version... That could've been a lot scarier.
| sschueller wrote:
| If gitlab keeps up with this hostility even towards paying
| customer a fork will be incoming sooner than later.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| A fork of what? If you run your own instance you have control
| over most of those features and limits. You can't fork a
| service because what you're getting from a service is not just
| the code. It's the cheaper economy of scale operational aspects
| of it. It's much cheaper to pay a SaaS provider, than to have
| someone on payroll that manages an open alternative of that
| SaaS for you. The SaaS provider can then introduce arbitrary
| plans and limits all they want. Do you want to start another
| company that resells Gitlab hosting that competes with
| Gitlab.com?
| dogleash wrote:
| How much of their business is the self hosted option? I assume
| but don't know that gitlab.com exists largely just to show off
| the product.
| mal10c wrote:
| There's always Gitea [1]. I've been using that for personal
| projects and it's perfect.
|
| [1]: https://docs.gitea.com/next/installation/comparison
| mschuster91 wrote:
| You can always run a GitLab CE instance on your own, takes less
| than five minutes to set up at any Docker hosting provider you
| want.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| I've been hosting my own GitLab for nearly 10 years, and it's
| been amazing and has grown with my environment really, really
| well.
| LeSaucy wrote:
| These are limited to 10 active users are they not?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| There are no limits when self-hosting.
| __jonas wrote:
| Last time I looked into Gitlab CE I decided not to go
| with it because there is no pull mirroring outside of
| their Premium offering, I would consider this a limit.
|
| https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/mirror
| /pu...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Limits are not features. There are no limits on number of
| users, number of repos, etc. etc. However, you're fairly
| obviously not getting any of the features that are in the
| paid tiers of gitlab's own offering. It's open core[1],
| rather than just open source.
|
| [1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-
| open-core...
| mschuster91 wrote:
| No. They're fine for at least 300 users (which is the case
| in an instance I run) and you can connect it with Keycloak
| and LDAP for SSO.
|
| You don't get SSO user-group mappings in CE, but heh, if
| you use Terraform that is easy enough to manage manually
| even at that size.
| revskill wrote:
| There's no mention on "Why changes", it's a red flag to me.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Probably because it's a publicly traded company that needs to
| please its shareholder.
|
| I honestly believe that what we are seeing is the realisation
| that money and growth isn't infinite and companies need to
| return to actually turn a profit, not just grow revenue. That's
| why we're seeing Reddit, Imgur, Gitlab, Meta, Twitter and
| others implement changes in rapid succession. It not even that
| I completely disagree with their choices, I just wonder why a
| dumb ass like myself who knows nothing of business was able to
| see broken business models years in advance, while Wall Street
| and Silicon Valley couldn't... Or did they just not care?
| revskill wrote:
| "Broken business" is vague though. There're always victims
| and winners. Shareholders in most cases is the winners here.
| deciplex wrote:
| They came right out and told you: nobody cared if nine out of
| ten investments were a total loss, provided the one had
| enough juice to make up for it. And, "juice" is an extremely
| vague term here: it could mean profitability, but given that
| there was so much money sloshing around, usually it just
| meant that the stock price jumped enough for investors to
| cash out - but that stock price was not necessarily tied to
| any tangible performance, much of the time.
|
| The real giveaway though, was the fact that stock dividends -
| you know, the thing that historically you _buy stock for_ -
| are basically unheard of among all but the biggest companies
| in tech (and even unheard of among some of those). We have
| now an entire generation of leaders in tech for whom
| profitability has been this kind of abstract notion they didn
| 't have to think about much, which explains why they all seem
| so ham-fisted now that they're being forced to.
| mrweasel wrote:
| That is a brilliantly worded comment.
| slicktux wrote:
| When will people just host their own GIT?? It's open source and
| web hosting services are cheap enough now a days that all you
| need is a domain and an internet facing server (raspberry pi)with
| SELinux...
| Strom wrote:
| I wonder how many people even care that git is involved. I know
| my personal choice of GitHub has absolutely nothing to do with
| git. I would use it just as well if it had a different source
| control system. Indeed I used to use Mercurial and only
| switched because that's what GitHub demanded. I wasn't out
| looking for a git host.
| RussianCow wrote:
| Are you seriously suggesting that companies host their mission
| critical Git repositories on a Raspberry Pi that they then have
| to manually manage?
| timetraveller26 wrote:
| We migrated to Github many months ago for this reason, we really
| didn't want to but the price was hard to justify for our small
| team.
| pyeri wrote:
| Why have technology companies become so greedy all over the world
| these days? Is it because recession is putting pressure on their
| revenues or have they collectively decided that time to cash in
| has come now?
| pi-rat wrote:
| Money is no longer free and abundant. Simply turning free
| investment money into growth and possible future revenue is no
| longer an option for most companies. Boards and bean counters
| have collectively started pressuring everyone to focus on
| revenue asap.
| freedomben wrote:
| It's because they are ultimately beholden to "shareholders" and
| "shareholders" nowadays expect continual growth. Not
| maintaining the "growth" will cause the share price to plummet
| and will eventually get the CEO fired. Furthermore, the high
| interest rates we have now are squeezing the hell out of
| margins, requiring these CEOs to look for turnips from which
| they can squeeze some blood.
|
| So tldr, the greed is a result of systemic forces, corporate
| structure, interest rates/inflation, and numbers on a
| spreadsheet.
| pyeri wrote:
| These systemic forces were always there since almost over a
| decade now but they always focused on growth, not revenue.
| Now, it's as if their cash flows are depleting and revenue is
| where they are focusing even at the cost of growth. Reddit is
| a classic example where they're not even caring about users
| leaving the platform and going elsewhere. They're perhaps
| realizing that those users are of no use to Reddit unless
| they can somehow turn them into revenue - which ironically
| those 3rd party apps seem to be doing better than Reddit
| itself!
| deciplex wrote:
| Continual growth has been there for decades, what's new is a
| focus on this thing called "profits." Until recently the
| incentive structure has favored growth almost to the
| exclusion of anything else, at least until you got very big.
|
| The reason so many companies are doing such a terrible job of
| it right now, is that frankly there aren't many c-levels in
| tech who are mentally equipped to think about their business
| that way, and even fewer who have ever been in a position
| where they had to. Reddit's the latest example of this: 18
| years and never been profitable? And Huffman calls himself a
| libertarian? Good grief.
|
| I'm glad of it. Our industry is filled with basically con-men
| who have no idea how to run a business profitably (or
| interest in doing so) but have made up for it by having the
| right phone numbers etc. It's good that they're being
| squeezed, because it creates room for people who want to run
| an honest business.
| iFire wrote:
| Does this means introducing a gradual rolloff of Gitlab? Gitlab
| does have a monopoly on opensource hosting.
|
| Personally, I'd leave all my existing gitlab archived as
| readonly, open, and move on.
| derN3rd wrote:
| Their pricing update end of last year was one of the reasons we
| switched over to Github. Other reasons were, that most external
| services had integration with Github but not with Gitlab, or that
| we didn't use many of the features Gitlab provided but charged
| for. If they would provide some lite plans with custom feature
| addons, we might have kept it, but all in all there was not much
| difference between Gitlab and Github except for the pricing then
| lazypenguin wrote:
| I've said it before and I agree with this comment. Their
| pricing structure is just too aggressive for smaller teams and
| I think they missed out on capturing a market segment. Maybe
| they determined it would be unprofitable to support small teams
| or something but I would have happily kept my team on GitLab if
| there was an ala carte or "lite" option like you suggested.
| Instead we also ended up on Github (as paying customers).
| jacquesm wrote:
| You could of course host it yourself.
| reaperman wrote:
| For small teams which were happy using the "free" tier,
| that's really the correct solution. Just self-host it and
| retain free-tier functionality.
|
| That said, it looks like the premium features are $29/mo or
| $99/mo per user regardless if you self-host it or take
| advantage of their managed SaaS offering. It's somewhat
| bizarre - there's a lot of costs associated with managing
| this on-site but no discount for that. I presume they feel
| that extra overhead cost to the customer of self-hosting
| breaks even with the perceived or actual added security
| value of self-managed installations.
|
| I might be reading it wrong, but that's how I see the
| pricing presented here and associated pages:
| https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/
| JeremyNT wrote:
| Yes, and the open source/core nature is IMO the single
| biggest feature of GitLab.
|
| The value proposition just doesn't look great to me when
| you're apples-to-apples comparing cloud hosted Gitlab to
| cloud hosted GitHub.
| lazypenguin wrote:
| We actually did self-host the community edition for several
| months using the omnibus version (some features you still
| need a license for that is same price as hoested). After
| initial setup it worked okay and was mostly hands-off
| except for that the performance started to degrade slowly
| over time. After spending a few weeks digging into the
| internals and failing to solve the problem we felt that we
| were better off just switching to a hosted provider. In
| this case we switched to GitHub because the pricing was
| better for the features we needed.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Yup. If I could say something like "I'll pay $12/year for a
| public repo, but don't want a wiki, container ecosystem or bug
| tracker" that would be great. Heck, I would pay $36/year for
| that. But I'm not paying $29/month/user for all the features
| I'm not going to use.
|
| SourceHut seems like it will someday be a competitor, but I'm
| frightened away by it's "alpha" state.
|
| Maybe there's a market for something that's more ala-carte?
| earthling8118 wrote:
| $12/year/repo? No, that is way too much. I would rather
| selfhost at that price point. With the number of repos I have
| that would be a ridiculous price. I don't use the wiki or the
| container registry so it is largely text file hosting at that
| point.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Too much... for you. I appreciate that. Sounds like we have
| mostly the same requirements though.
| WWLink wrote:
| And of course, github is owned by microsoft, so at some point
| it'll probably be bundled into their Azure/Office/Microsoft 365
| nonsense. Then it'll be a no brainer to buy it because you'll
| already be getting it whether you like it or not.
| bachmeier wrote:
| I don't know if I see that happening. They'd either have to
| either give it away for free as part of the bundle, or raise
| everyone's prices. The first would be bad for revenue and the
| other would cost them customers that don't care about Github.
| MattIPv4 wrote:
| Just got an email from GitLab about a group I'm part of that has
| more than five users. The docs linked says "For existing
| namespaces, this limit is being rolled out gradually. Impacted
| users are notified in GitLab.com at least 60 days before the
| limit is applied.", however upon checking the group in GitLab, we
| are greeted by a big red box stating "Your top-level group
| [group] is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-
| only state."
| mmcwilliams wrote:
| Also got an email but interestingly the most populated group
| I'm a member of has 4 users in it including myself. It did
| mention that my "top-level" group has reached the 5-member
| limit but it references a numerical ID that doesn't match my
| user or any of the groups I'm member to.
|
| There may be a glitch with this rollout.
| mike-cardwell wrote:
| Yeah, I got the same email. I am in one group, and that group
| has one other person in it.
| xx_ns wrote:
| I'm in exactly 0 groups, never been in one, and I got the
| same email.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here.
|
| The gradual roll out of this change started with a blog post[0]
| and included in-app notifications for the owners of impacted
| groups on GitLab.com.
|
| If the group owner did not log in during the in-app
| notification period, they were then emailed (the email you
| received today) notifying that the group was impacted.
|
| [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-
| tier...
| Nouser76 wrote:
| I don't know that it's a great plan to do a blogpost and in-
| app notification as the first round of reminders and email on
| the day of the change. Both the blogpost and in-app
| notification requires you to explicitly go on GitLab and see
| there's a problem. Maybe there's a reason to avoid it, but
| emailing from the get-go seems like it is the right move for
| transparency and not rug-pulling.
|
| EDIT: clarified antecedent
| em-bee wrote:
| i got an email that the limit in one of my groups is reached.
|
| i just logged in and there is no indication of any limit.
|
| i had to step through every group to find out where the limit
| was reached.
|
| turns out that there was one group that had two sub groups
| which added up to 5 members. at the group overview this is
| listed as "two" (for the two subgroups). it would be very
| helpful if the group overview
| (https://gitlab.com/dashboard/groups) would list the total
| number of people as well as flag every group where the limit
| is reached or crossed.
|
| but, you say the limit is 5 people. in this group there are
| exactly 5 people, yet the warning claims 'Your top-level
| group is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-
| only state.'
|
| how can that be? 5 is more than 5?
|
| it doesn't matter in my case because this is an old project
| no longer worked on, so read only is fine, and there is no
| need to act, but i think you need to work on your system
| because i am sure there will be more cases like that.
|
| lastly i want to add that while that limit is fine for small
| businesses, it is an absolute disaster for FOSS projects.
| FOSS projects don't have the funding to pay for your service,
| so they won't. their only option is to leave. if any of my
| projects get any traction then i have no choice but to go
| look for a more FOSS friendly service. i thought gitlab was
| that, i wanted to make a point against github and support
| their most likely competitor by drawing attention to you.
|
| gitlab really does not gain anything by enforcing this limit
| for FOSS projects. FOSS projects often have many members that
| are not very active. a busy startup with 5 members probably
| creates the same activity and uses the same resources as a
| FOSS project with 50 members because most of those 50 members
| rarely contribute to the project.
|
| or instead of limiting members, limit how often the more
| expensive resources are used. like limiting how often the CI
| is running.
|
| i urge you to consider to allow a higher limit for groups
| that only have projects that use a FOSS license.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Wouldn't it make more sense to email them before they were
| impacted instead of when they were impacted? What's the point
| of gradual roll out that requires I read your blog etc. An
| email that says "You have 60 days to X" is a lot more
| effective than one that says "60 days ago we made a blog post
| letting you know, and now you're f'd."
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| Look they announced it publicly posted right in the back of
| the file cabinet in the basement behind the warning rabid
| tigers sign.
|
| Here's a question for Gitlab: "Why did you require me to
| give you an email address to sign up?"
|
| The answer to that question means there is no explaining
| why they didn't use it _first_ , and followed up with at
| least a couple updates along the way. This is exactly what
| the address exists on thier db for.
| alex3305 wrote:
| > If the group owner did not log in during the in-app
| notification period, they were then emailed (the email you
| received today) notifying that the group was impacted.
|
| I think there is a glitch in your mail or something else is
| going wrong. I'm currently not in any groups and still got an
| e-mail telling me that my top level group (starting with
| 5060) has reached the 5 members limit. Searching for the
| group also doesn't yield any results whatsoever.
| john_cogs wrote:
| Thanks, we are investigating this and the above reports
| about this behavior.
| IceDane wrote:
| Did you really just say "If you had logged in, you would have
| known that you had to log in"?
| faangsticle wrote:
| "But the plans were on display..."
|
| "On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to
| find them."
|
| "That's the display department."
|
| "With a flashlight."
|
| "Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
|
| "So had the stairs."
|
| "But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
|
| "Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display in the
| bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory
| with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard."
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I'm currently hosting a git repo on my home machine and it's used
| by me when I'm on the road and a few people I trust enough to
| have logins on my DMZ machine.
|
| It seems there _should_ be an easy way to use gitlab or github as
| a public read-only proxy to changes that are released on the
| private repo. And then going the other way, sucks up PRs from
| public sites and lovingly integrates them into the "real" repo
| on my home machine.
|
| Yes. There are security ramifications. There are availability
| ramifications. I seems slightly to be trying to skirt GitLab's
| policies they're probably putting into effect to avoid going
| bankrupt. But the flip-side is I really don't need a wiki or a
| bug tracker or whatever else GitLab is working on. I would pay a
| small amount of cash to just get a public repo mirror.
|
| And we all have different ideas about how to make this "easy". I
| don't mind running scripts on my local host, but would like to
| avoid polling the public repo to see if someone's posted a PR. I
| also don't want to have to run a script in a container on the
| public repo. So would love it if you could set the public repo to
| proxy PRs to a remote repo.
|
| Just curious if anyone else has similar requirements. Maybe you
| have a corporate repo and want to mirror it to a public site like
| GitLab, GitHub or SourceHut. Maybe, like me, *you* just want a
| remote repo to stash your code but a public location so your home
| server doesn't melt down that one time someone slashdots your
| project.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Gitlab does repo mirroring.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Thx for the response. That might be a solution. I fear that
| GitLab might notice me doing that and decide they don't like
| it. But definitely something to play around with. I'll look
| again on the site and see if I can see where you activate it;
| didn't see it first time around.
| lbotos wrote:
| As someone who works at the Co -- If you are within the
| free usage limits, we are fine with you mirroring a repo on
| .com.
|
| If you are hosting game binaries or Shrek the 3rd we might
| have some problems, but if you have a _genuine source code
| project_ that shouldn 't be a problem unless you become a
| DDoS target.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Lol. Yes. Thx for the reply. Definitely real code. I
| think the closest we come to "media" are a few open
| source fonts which we're using in accordance w/ the
| license.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| It's not that hard to setup. It's a built-in feature in
| something like gitea. Or you can write a `git push` cron task
| or a server hook in git to keep the 2 in sync. GitHub is full
| of mirror repos. You can also disable issues, discussions,
| wiki, and pull requests if you don't want to deal with that.
| oefrha wrote:
| > You can also disable ... pull requests
|
| That is the one thing you can't disable on GitHub unless
| something changed recently. Very annoying for mirrors where
| development happens elsewhere.
| TillE wrote:
| Make a README.md which clearly states this at the top, and
| a CONTRIBUTING.md. After that, it's just not your problem
| if someone opens a PR.
| duskwuff wrote:
| There are a couple of other options, although I'll agree
| that none of them are ideal:
|
| 1) You can set up Github Actions to automatically close
| pull requests:
| https://github.com/marketplace/actions/close-pull-request
|
| 2) You can use "interaction limits" (in repository
| settings, under "moderation options") to limit repository
| interactions to collaborators. This can only be set for 6
| months at a time, though, so you'll need to reactivate it
| periodically.
|
| 3) You can archive the project and unarchive it
| temporarily when making changes, disabling all activity
| on the fork.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| That's what I'm doing now. It's what I don't want to do. I
| want the public repo to autopush PRs to my private repo so I
| don't have to poll it.
|
| [LOL. A previous edit autocorrected "autopush" to "autopsy."
| Or maybe it was a Freudian slip on my part.]
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| You can trigger a GitHub action on any PR and run any
| arbitrary code you want.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Again. I DON'T want to run a script in a container on
| github's infrastructure.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| If you're polling, you can use GitHub APIs. They are
| pretty well documented. If you want a turn-key solution,
| use gitea. Depending on how flexible you need it, gitea
| might cover your scenarios. But you can have actions in
| gitea as well that automate polling GitHub APIs for
| issues or comments or pull requests etc.
| uvatbc wrote:
| GitHub self hosted runners might address this concern.
| suprjami wrote:
| About needing logins on your DMZ machine, that's not necessary
| if they use SSH keys to access the git user, which has no
| shell.
|
| You might find it easier to manage those permissions with
| gitolite if you want to restrict the users to just git access,
| and to just some repos.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| Gitea supports push mirrors.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Oh. Hadn't thought of Gitea in a while. Will check it out.
| Thx for the reply!
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Not just push mirrors but pull mirrors and push+pull mirrors.
| I frequently use the pull mirrors to backup repos that I
| don't trust to stay around (either because they might break a
| TOS or be right on the line, or i expect the author to not
| leave it around for some reason). It's definitely become one
| of my "must have" for any kind of local hosting stuff esp
| since the docker images make it basically painless to deploy.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Yeah. I don't want to set up docker. I just want the public
| server to mirror the PR by pushing it to my private server.
| Launching docker to diff the public mirror against the
| private server isn't completely out of the question. It
| just seems "inelegant." But I dislike it less than I
| dislike the idea of running a cron job on the private
| server to poll the public server.
|
| Thanks for the suggestion, though. I may go ahead with
| something like this.
| joduplessis wrote:
| Surprisingly GitLab feels very dated. Their drive has been toward
| enterprise sales instead of product IMO. Nothing bad about that -
| but focus on product development at least as well.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here.
|
| Not sure how frequently you're using GitLab but we recently
| updated our navigation. Feedback on the new nav is being
| collected here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/issues/409005
|
| We've also invested heavily in AI features including Code
| Suggestions which is free for all users while in beta. You can
| read more about the AI features in GitLab here:
| https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/
| ygouzerh wrote:
| Why downgrading the pricing when Github have a much better
| pricing and just rollout some crazy new GPT-powered features?
|
| We had in our backlog to explore a PoC to try out Github, since
| the announcement of Copilot X.
|
| Now, with this pricing announcement, this PoC will be transformed
| into a full migration from Gitlab to Github.
| dijit wrote:
| ok. so;
|
| it used to be:
|
| $0 - for as many users as you wanted
|
| $4 - per user, with some important additional features, including
| SSO and merge request approvals
|
| $19 - for nearly all the features except very enterprise/security
| ones
|
| EUR99 - for all festures.
|
| ---
|
| over the last 2 years they have dropped the $4 option _and_
| increased the $19 option.
|
| so now there is a cliff; free for 5: $29 for everything.
|
| Not sure why I would use gitlab over github if thats the up-front
| hill I will have to climb: for what its worth Perforce also has
| almost exactly this pricing model and has the games industry by
| the balls, but perforce has no real competitor.
|
| fwiw I am a gitlab user for 10 years and have advocated for its
| use, the only reason I haven't migrated off at this point is the
| switching cost
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