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sources/news/20220804 GitLab Plans to Save Up to -1M by Deleting Inactive Projects by Free Users.md
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GitLab Plans to Save Up to $1M by Deleting Inactive Projects by Free Users
Right after Microsoft acquired GitHub, many users migrated to GitLab and other GitHub alternatives.
Considering many popular open-source projects can be found on GitLab, it has a good reputation with developers and project maintainers.
Now, there has been an interesting development at GitLab, as reported by The Register.
GitLab to Remove Inactive Projects in Free Accounts
As per The Register, sources who requested anonymity revealed that a new policy is scheduled to come into force in September 2022, which will result in removing several inactive projects on GitLab.
In other words, if you are a free tier user on GitLab and have an idle project with no recent updates in 12 months, it will be auto-deleted.
Apparently, this move cuts GitLab’s hosting costs and saves up to $1 million a year.
While that sounds like a sizable saving, it does not make things appear better.
The report also states that a single comment, commit, or issue for a project during 12 months will ensure that it does not get deleted.
In addition to the new policy, you can expect GitLab to provide users weeks or months as a warning before deleting any of their work.
A Valid Excuse: Is it?
GitLab deleting projects to save disk space is a big deal.
The entire point of offering free services was to let users host code on their platform, whether the project remains active or not. One can agree that everyone should encourage projects to have some activity. But why should that be a requirement to host your code on a platform that promises free services?
A developer can simply choose to make a simple tool/program and keep it at GitLab for anyone to find and fork it, with no aim to maintain/update it. Sometimes, the developer may no longer be available or have access to add activity to their projects.
For example, we have plenty of GitHub projects that haven’t seen any activity for years, but people still rely on it, fork it, and use it.
So, I’m sure you will come across several hundred projects that do not have any activity but are helpful or have a working fork.
I think GitLab should manage its pricing plans and finances better to keep up with the free tier offerings.
GitLab is Taking the Easy Way Out
If the report is accurate and GitLab proceeds to enforce this kind of policy later this year, it will not have a good impact.
The free tier accounts have access to 5 GB of storage. We could lose access to various small creators’ incredible tools/projects.
GitLab hasn’t made any public statements regarding this situation. We’ll make sure to update our coverage if something pops up.
What do you think about GitLab’s auto-deletion policy? What should GitLab do about it? Kindly let me know your thoughts in the comments down below.
via: https://news.itsfoss.com/gitlab-inactive-projects-policy/
作者：Ankush Das 选题：lujun9972 译者：译者ID 校对：校对者ID