There may be a glitch with this rollout.
The gradual roll out of this change started with a blog post[0] and included in-app notifications for the owners of impacted groups on GitLab.com.
If the group owner did not log in during the in-app notification period, they were then emailed (the email you received today) notifying that the group was impacted.
[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
EDIT: clarified antecedent
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
I think there is a glitch in your mail or something else is going wrong. I'm currently not in any groups and still got an e-mail telling me that my top level group (starting with 5060) has reached the 5 members limit. Searching for the group also doesn't yield any results whatsoever.
i just logged in and there is no indication of any limit.
i had to step through every group to find out where the limit was reached.
turns out that there was one group that had two sub groups which added up to 5 members. at the group overview this is listed as "two" (for the two subgroups). it would be very helpful if the group overview (https://gitlab.com/dashboard/groups) would list the total number of people as well as flag every group where the limit is reached or crossed.
but, you say the limit is 5 people. in this group there are exactly 5 people, yet the warning claims 'Your top-level group is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-only state.'
how can that be? 5 is more than 5?
it doesn't matter in my case because this is an old project no longer worked on, so read only is fine, and there is no need to act, but i think you need to work on your system because i am sure there will be more cases like that.
lastly i want to add that while that limit is fine for small businesses, it is an absolute disaster for FOSS projects. FOSS projects don't have the funding to pay for your service, so they won't. their only option is to leave. if any of my projects get any traction then i have no choice but to go look for a more FOSS friendly service. i thought gitlab was that, i wanted to make a point against github and support their most likely competitor by drawing attention to you.
gitlab really does not gain anything by enforcing this limit for FOSS projects. FOSS projects often have many members that are not very active. a busy startup with 5 members probably creates the same activity and uses the same resources as a FOSS project with 50 members because most of those 50 members rarely contribute to the project.
or instead of limiting members, limit how often the more expensive resources are used. like limiting how often the CI is running.
i urge you to consider to allow a higher limit for groups that only have projects that use a FOSS license.
I have _no_ groups with the id's mentioned in the email.
Also, I'm a solo hobbyist dev, there are no groups with more than one user in it.
I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money.
A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.
(This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".)
Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)
To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying in data.
Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license, which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that statement.
or they use "free" to nuke competitors from orbit, salt the ground to ensure nobody can get a dime for a decade in this industry, hoard all the expertise then increase your pricing by orders of magnitude like it happened with Google Maps.
This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
The last big antitrust push we had was against Microsoft. And after the judge was replaced for improper communication during trial, MS and DoJ settled. Basically, was a huge case then "Oops nevermind".
You mention buildkite as something you think is a lot better than GH Actions. I'm curious if you've also used the Gitlab equivalent and can compare (I haven't, really).
Github Actions might not be the best but so is Buildkite. It's not exactly strictly better in every way.
Having used all 3 mentioned, it'd be Gitlab > Github > Buildkite for CI/CD for me.
Github wins at least by the sheer community support. Every vendor has an action.
Plus, I greatly appreciate the transparency of many of the features that Gitlab sells around security outlining exactly which open source tools they use so that you can just go do it yourself on the CI pipeline. The real value for the premium security tier is when you have a team coordinating multiple projects.
I've seen Github try to upsell to enterprise with features that I can just install in a few minutes using the tools that Gitlab tells me about.
They're also buggy, and in my experience I keep hitting bugs that are long-tail and therefore never prioritized to actually fix.
GitLab was drastically cheaper, offering free private repos, and interesting features ahead of GitHub (although IMO always slightly less "sexy" than GitHub, using Ruby on Rails, etc.).
But at the time they gathered (1) serious funding money and (2) influx from MS-asylants their priorities started to change. But they were still the cheaper option for quite some time IIRC. The pandemic and the associated gold-rush/growth in IT pushed the dynamics over the edge I think.
Now their position is not really that different from GitHub's, and I think it is kind of a preference thing.
I can do with both, but I kind of still like the appeal and UX in GitHub. GitLab will always be in my heart, just like ever "Underdog" (even if that was a long time ago).
I could further see myself immediately falling for a third alternative, if it was sexy/unique enough with drastically better UX, and I think that is not even too far fetched.
But there is the thing, GitHub is a platform, not (just) a tool. GitLab still managed to take ground - kudos! That would be the hard part.
Let's say we have 40 employees who code and 30 employees who create tickets, and we want to get all of the security scanning features that the platform has to offer.
For GitLab, we need the $99/user/month plan because the security features are only available in that subscription. Guest users are completely free, but they're extremely gimped when it comes to issues, so most likely you'll have to have most if not all of your non-coding employees at the $99/user/month tier. Final price is $6930/month (or $3960/month if you can really handle the gimped guests).
For GitHub, you need to pay $19.25/user/month plan for every user and $49/month for every person that commits code for the security features. So that's $1347.50/month for user accounts and $1960 for security features for a total of $3307.50/month.
GitHub is not even half what GitLab wants. It's even less than the gimped guest user experience that you can subject yourself to with GitLab.
Ctrl-f search doesn't work anymore because it lazy loads the file as you scroll, with a very noticable lag at that.
Some repos are inexplicably limited to 50KiB/s.
And yes I have a powerful computer, very good Internet connection with low latency to GitHub.
Have they outdone Oracle? Impressive! :)
On a serious note, is your comment based on historical or recent events?
How are they an enemy?
SourceHut seems like it will someday be a competitor, but I'm frightened away by it's "alpha" state.
Maybe there's a market for something that's more ala-carte?
it used to be:
$0 - for as many users as you wanted
$4 - per user, with some important additional features, including SSO and merge request approvals
$19 - for nearly all the features except very enterprise/security ones
€99 - for all festures.
—-
over the last 2 years they have dropped the $4 option and increased the $19 option.
so now there is a cliff; free for 5: $29 for everything.
Not sure why I would use gitlab over github if thats the up-front hill I will have to climb: for what its worth Perforce also has almost exactly this pricing model and has the games industry by the balls, but perforce has no real competitor.
fwiw I am a gitlab user for 10 years and have advocated for its use, the only reason I haven't migrated off at this point is the switching cost
It seems there should be an easy way to use gitlab or github as a public read-only proxy to changes that are released on the private repo. And then going the other way, sucks up PRs from public sites and lovingly integrates them into the "real" repo on my home machine.
Yes. There are security ramifications. There are availability ramifications. I seems slightly to be trying to skirt GitLab's policies they're probably putting into effect to avoid going bankrupt. But the flip-side is I really don't need a wiki or a bug tracker or whatever else GitLab is working on. I would pay a small amount of cash to just get a public repo mirror.
And we all have different ideas about how to make this "easy". I don't mind running scripts on my local host, but would like to avoid polling the public repo to see if someone's posted a PR. I also don't want to have to run a script in a container on the public repo. So would love it if you could set the public repo to proxy PRs to a remote repo.
Just curious if anyone else has similar requirements. Maybe you have a corporate repo and want to mirror it to a public site like GitLab, GitHub or SourceHut. Maybe, like me, *you* just want a remote repo to stash your code but a public location so your home server doesn't melt down that one time someone slashdots your project.
[LOL. A previous edit autocorrected "autopush" to "autopsy." Or maybe it was a Freudian slip on my part.]
That is the one thing you can’t disable on GitHub unless something changed recently. Very annoying for mirrors where development happens elsewhere.
You might find it easier to manage those permissions with gitolite if you want to restrict the users to just git access, and to just some repos.
The limit discussed here only applied to the instance hosted by GitLab.
Any idea whether they'll eventually chip away at public-visibility open source projects?
"We're not Microsoft" might be GitLab's biggest remaining selling point. And the more savvy open source developers might care disproportionately about that. I'd think GitLab might be trying to lure open source, now that GitHub isn't the warm-fuzzy company that originally landed a lot of it, yet GitHub continues to be the de facto official provider for most major open source projects and ecosystems. Plus that has network effects for landing paying customers. Has GitLab given up on that?
BTW, I'm fine with GitLab charging for non-open-source commercial projects. If your startup has more than 5 users, you probably already have salaries in your burn rate, and GitLab is a relatively small cost, for a critical service. (See: TLC's "No Scrubs".) I've happily paid for GitLab in earlier-stage startups.
I've been happy moving back to GitHub post Microsoft acquisition. If I ever got fed up with GitHub I find Gitea to be refreshingly simple and does basically everything I need.
I do wish the best for GitLab though and am rooting for them. Any company that makes an OSS model work is one worth having hope for.
Now explain why it was not used for it's only legitimate reason for existing in your posession, first, let alone followed up with a few updates as the deadline got closer.
You have a communication channel that not only is good for this, but exists for this exact sole purpose in the first place. If you aren't going to use it for that, then you have no legitimate reason to have it and I want you to delete it.
Not sure how frequently you're using GitLab but we recently updated our navigation. Feedback on the new nav is being collected here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005
We've also invested heavily in AI features including Code Suggestions which is free for all users while in beta. You can read more about the AI features in GitLab here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/
I've found them extremely unreliable both in my free account (every failure takes 1-2 mins away from my 50 minutes!) and in my employers paid subscription so we self run but run into issues with not being able to scale runners enough to meet developers demands.
Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth)
Yeah this is odd - it's slightly annoying having to docker login as part of jobs.
We had in our backlog to explore a PoC to try out Github, since the announcement of Copilot X.
Now, with this pricing announcement, this PoC will be transformed into a full migration from Gitlab to Github.
Gitlab is almost certainly the most unethical company I’ve ever seen.
Personally, I'd leave all my existing gitlab archived as readonly, open, and move on.
I honestly believe that what we are seeing is the realisation that money and growth isn't infinite and companies need to return to actually turn a profit, not just grow revenue. That's why we're seeing Reddit, Imgur, Gitlab, Meta, Twitter and others implement changes in rapid succession. It not even that I completely disagree with their choices, I just wonder why a dumb ass like myself who knows nothing of business was able to see broken business models years in advance, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley couldn't... Or did they just not care?
The real giveaway though, was the fact that stock dividends - you know, the thing that historically you buy stock for - are basically unheard of among all but the biggest companies in tech (and even unheard of among some of those). We have now an entire generation of leaders in tech for whom profitability has been this kind of abstract notion they didn't have to think about much, which explains why they all seem so ham-fisted now that they're being forced to.
So tldr, the greed is a result of systemic forces, corporate structure, interest rates/inflation, and numbers on a spreadsheet.
The reason so many companies are doing such a terrible job of it right now, is that frankly there aren't many c-levels in tech who are mentally equipped to think about their business that way, and even fewer who have ever been in a position where they had to. Reddit's the latest example of this: 18 years and never been profitable? And Huffman calls himself a libertarian? Good grief.
I'm glad of it. Our industry is filled with basically con-men who have no idea how to run a business profitably (or interest in doing so) but have made up for it by having the right phone numbers etc. It's good that they're being squeezed, because it creates room for people who want to run an honest business.
