Yesterday we shared here on the blog the news that GitLab planned to modify its terms of service for the next month (in September), according to which the projects hosted on free accounts from GitLab.com will be deleted automatically if your repositories remain inactive for 12 months.
And now GitLab has reversed its decision to automatically delete projects that have been inactive for more than a year and belong to its free tier users and that it planned to introduce the policy at the end of September. The company hoped the move would save it up to $XNUMX million a year and help make its SaaS business sustainable.
Geoff Huntley, an open source advocate, described the policy as "absolutely insane." "The source code doesn't take up a lot of disk space," he said. “For someone to remove all this code is the destruction of the community. They will destroy your brand and your goodwill.”
“People host their code there because there is an idea that it will be available to the general public for reuse and remixing,” he added. "Of course, there's no guarantee that it will always be hosted there, but the unwritten rules of open source are that the code is available and you don't remove it."
"We had maintainers pull the code and there was a lot of community outrage over that," he said, noting that other projects that depend on a pulled product will suffer.
"Not all dependencies can compile," he lamented.
About the case GitLab has repeatedly refused to comment on its removal plan, and a few hours ago, the company, which did not deny the information from The Register, but did not mention anything about it, he only tweeted that he would shelve inactive projects in object storage:
“We have discussed internally what to do with inactive repositories. We made the decision to move unused buckets to item storage. Once deployed, they will still be accessible, but it will take a little longer to access after a long period of inactivity.”
Object storage is a strategy for managing and manipulating data storage as separate units called "objects." These objects are kept in a vault, without being attached to files located in other folders. Object storage combines the data that makes up the files, then processes all the relevant metadata before assigning them a custom identifier.
“Documents we have seen informed staff of an internal meeting scheduled for August 9. The meeting agenda outlines the plan to remove inactive code repositories, describing it as follows*:
They mention that after September 22, 2022, the retention policy will be implemented of data for free users. This routine will limit the number of months a free project can remain inactive before it is automatically deleted along with the data it contains.
It is mentioned that GitLab's tweet may, in the eyes of some netizens, contradict their own staff notification:
“Other internal documents we've seen mention the possible use of object storage to archive projects, but are concerned that this will increase GitLab's costs by creating the need for multiple redundant backups.
“We also saw internal discussions confirming that the automation code for deleting idle projects was complete at the end of July and ready to roll out after months of discussion and development work.
“One of our sources told us this afternoon that it was online pressure, led by our reporting, that forced GitHub's rival to drastically rethink its thinking. News of the removal policy as an exercise in saving money caused a furor on Twitter and Reddit."
Anyway, GitLab's tweet was well received but also raised some other questions*:
“If only the owner can get it back, have you thought about the deeply unfortunate case where a project manager dies and their code becomes inaccessible a year after their activity on the site* ceases? »
GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij offered more information about his plans in the following tweet:
archived projects https://t.co/4rOeJHNilh is a user activated state that signals intent. We're not sure yet but very likely the storage type used is orthogonal to that. Our current plan for object storage https://t.co/fLRl2TY744 would keep the repos visible to everyone.
— Sid Sijbrandij (@sytses) August 5
However, the company refused to respond to requests for information from the US media that published this information.
Don Quixote has been inactive for centuries...