GitLab to erase projects not updated for a year
The business aims to make annual savings of up to $1 million, but users have called it "wild"
GitLab intends to automatically erase projects from its free tier users' accounts if they have not been touched for a year.
The policy, slated to go into effect in September 2022, could save the coding collaboration service up to $1 million annually, according to information obtained by The Register.
The expenditures associated with such projects make up as much as a quarter of GitLab's total hosting expenses.
GitLab is aware users could be slightly peeved by its plan, and says it will provide a notice that could come weeks or months before deleting their work.
A project will need just a single new comment, commit, or new issue during a 12-month period to keep it alive. Without any activity, though, it will be killed off.
Some GitLab members are concerned the new policy could see projects deleted before users can back up their code.
Given the widespread use of several open-source projects, the decision could have a considerable negative impact.
Open-source supporter and member of the open.Net community Geoff Huntley called the policy "absolutely wild."
He argued that source code does not consume a significant amount of disk space.
"For someone to delete all that code is destruction of the community. They are going to destroy their brand and goodwill."
Huntley questioned whether a repository could be regarded as dormant.
"Software gets written and then it ' s done. When you get to a point of perfection, does that make it inactive?"
GitLab was founded in 2011 by Ukrainian developers Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov. From day one, its primary function has been to serve as both a code repository service and a set of collaboration tools.
GitLab's free tier includes five users per namespace, 5GB of storage, 10GB of data transfers, and 400 CI/CD minutes per month. About 20% of GitLab users, 6 million accounts, use the free tier.
Paid plans range from $19 - $99 a month.
GitLab publicly advertises its free tier as a means of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
'As a commercial organisation, we always want to grow the number of paying customers, therefore we are focused on increasing the free to paid conversion rate. However, GitLab offers a free product, and our free users bring tremendous value to the company beyond just the likelihood of converting to a paid customer one day,' the company says on its pricing model.
'Happy loyal free users become advocates of GitLab, which brings more users and strengthens our brand,' it adds.
Despite that, the business intends to discourage some use of its free product in order to achieve its primary objective of cost cutting - a decision that is surely going to annoy a large number of GitLab users.