According to the latest report, the online code and more details hosting giant GitLab plan to automatically delete inactive projects within a year of free users. Such projects account for a quarter of GitLab’s hosting costs, and the automatic deletion of projects could save a multi-cloud coding collaboration service up to $1 million a year, the report said. As such, this policy helps GitLab remain financially sustainable. The policy is scheduled to take effect in September 2022, the people said.
GitLab is aware that the plan could be met with backlash, and will send users weeks or months of advance warnings before removing inactive projects from free users. Project deletion can be avoided as long as a comment, commit, or issue has been posted to the project within 12 months.
We discussed internally what to do with inactive repositories.
We reached a decision to move unused repos to object storage.
Once implemented, they will still be accessible but take a bit longer to access after a long period of inactivity.— 🦊 GitLab (@gitlab) August 4, 2022
Geoff Huntley, an open source advocate and participant in the Open .Net community, described the policy as “absolutely insane”. “The source code doesn’t take up much disk space, and removing this code is a disruption to the community, and they will destroy their brand and goodwill,” he said.
GitLab’s free tier offers 5GB of storage, 10GB of data transfer, and 400 minutes of CI/CD per month, as well as five user quotas per namespace. The cheapest paid plan is $19 per month. After The Register reported, GitLab has been pressured to announce a new policy. Its official tweet said that it will no longer delete inactive projects of free users, but will put them in object storage, which is slower to access than other projects.
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