this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Programming
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I saw in other comments that you aren't happy with the direction GitLab is going in and feel that they're focusing on business customers at the expense of open source users. Can you expand on that?
The project I am working on joined the GitLab for Open Source program and it was absolutely painless. All we needed to do was submit an application and now we're using Ultimate without paying a cent.
I'm not sure it's what you're referring to, but one of the pain points for me is that open source projects (that don't join the program) no longer have access to lots of free SaaS CI hours. That sucks, but I can't blame them - they had a plague of crypto miners taking advantage of those free CI hours. It's not reasonable to expect them to eat that cost, especially when the open source program is so easy to join.
Biggest pain point is contributing to projects across instances (no federation). IINM they had very few business customers asking for it and more community members asking for it --> no priority.
Then at some point they decided their main instance was costing them too much money and started limiting their offerings for open source projects. I can't remember all the changes, but IIRC it was limiting the number of users in groups, free minutes for CICD (understandable, no problem with that), moving some basic free features into premium like protected branches, code owners, issue dependencies, epics, roadmaps, etc. . Most of those things can be acquired for free on github + some other tool like JIRA.
They put all that behind premium which once started at 20$/user and is now 29$/user! Additionally, self-hosting doesn't solve anything as it's still behind premium. I contribute frequently to projects on github, so my activity on gitlab was not very high, so I wouldn't qualify for their open source program (at least I didn't back then). Regardless, I wasn't going to waste precious time filling out some form and possibly having to justify my activities on gitlab just to get what was free before. My prior positive tone about Gitlab soured and now I recommend people don't use Gitlab.
Gitlab might've had the stuff to become a github killer, but now they're just an expensive, inconvenient, open-source, sourceforge. Federation will get them a step closer, but if they don't get rid of that ridiculous tiering it won't get them more users. If I self-host, I'm offloading from their main service and get to pay them for it. No thank you.
I'm definitely not interested in convincing you to change your mind but I do want to reply to some specific items.
The only limitation I can find is that top-level groups on the free plan are limited to 5 users. Granted, there are certainly reasons to keep a group private, but public groups are not limited.
Protected branches are available for all plans. I'm pretty certain the rest of the features you mentioned were never free. You can disagree with that choice, but it is incorrect to say they were moved into premium.
I dunno, it's been a while since I looked at the stuff in depth. They are definitely not fresh in my memory. What really stuck with me were my negative feelings towards Gitlab. Maybe someday they'll pop up in my life again and surprise me 🤷