Thursday, August 4, 2022

GitLab to Delete Dormant Projects From Free Accounts

Simon Sharwood:

GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they’ve been inactive for a year and are owned by users of its free tier.

The Register has learned that such projects account for up to a quarter of GitLab’s hosting costs, and that the auto-deletion of projects could save the cloudy coding collaboration service up to $1 million a year.

[…]

Geoff Huntley, an open-source advocate, and participant in the open .Net community, described the policy as “absolutely wild.”

“Source code does not take up much disk space,” he told The Register. “For someone to delete all that code is destruction of the community. They are going to destroy their brand and goodwill."

It seems like something is missing from this story. Are these users storing something other than source code? Are there repos that have not been updated recently but that get large numbers of downloads?

Update (2022-08-05): Simon Sharwood:

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

See also: Hacker News.

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Looks like there’s been a change of heart, at least somewhat: https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/05/gitlab_reverses_deletion_policy/

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