Why pay for a service when you can be a complete parasite?
Programmers these days are the equivalent of the newest generation smartphone users: they live and breath in digital, live by their smartphones, but completely isolated in their instagram and tiktok bubbles, totally unable to find any information by themselves.
Programmers are the same.
Gitlab announced that they were going to change their free tier by deleting projects that were deemed inactive for more than one year. The "open source" parasites went up in arms. How DARE you, gitlab, a for-profit corporation, stop offering everything you have for free?
=> Gitlab to delete dormant projects
In the meantime, gitlab itself changed it's mind, deciding that dormant projects goes to cold storage.
Here's my, unpopular, take: Gitlab should have gone ahead with it's plan and please, stop calling programmers "mantainers" and stop consider them more important than they are. Truth is, the free software movement is full of parasitic entities (the mantainers), that think they have the right to a full-fledged infrastructure (hosting, CI/CD, packaging etc..) for free, simply because they decided to give away their software.
On Hacker News (I know, I'm a masochist), there is even somebody saying shit like this:
There's a reason GitHub is the de facto host for OSS projects, I'd posit that open source maintainers who deliberately choose an unconventional host like GitLab already increase the barrier to contributions (not just due to network effects, but an unfamiliar UI, feature parity, poor performance etc) and this change would've already tipped the balance in my view and made it even clearer GitLab is not the right choice for OSS.
Those, poor contributors. Again, we aren't talking about Karen from South Dakota, working as a barista using her computer, we are talking about programmers. People that should live and die by their laptops and that shouldn't have any kind of problem contributing to any project, once they have read those couple of "how to contribute" lines.
The line of reasoning that a programmer has problems with an "unfamiliar interface" and the fact that somebody even suggests this could be an issue, speaks volume about the fact that "open source", is not a movement anymore, just a CV-enriching program.
The majority of the Hacker News readers, live in the Silicon Valley, where salaries for programmers are the highest in the world. Are you seriously telling me that they don't have $5USD to pay for a VPS, self-hosting their repositories with gitea or fossil? We all know corporations are greedy, with bean counters doing everything they can to get away with as much as possible for free. But you, as a programmer, are the guilty one in this case. because when a company like gitlab says: "look, we got to save a bunch of money. If you aren't paying, we must delete a bunch of old data", instead of quietly evaluating your options, you go hairy about the fact gitlab doesn't consider you the most important living being in the world.
Oh, gitlab, how dare you to ask for $USD10 or 20 a month to somebody using:
Don't you feel ashamed, gitlab? Don't you feel those mantainers (don't dare call them programmers), deserves the hundred man-years you put in your product for free? Even more, you should PAY them for the privilege of hosting their open source (with emphasis) projects on your platform!
Don't mention self-hosting to those lazy asses, they don't have the time to manage a VPS, but they totally have the time to whine about corporations that gave thousands of man-hours worth of work to them for free for YEARS.
The backlash Gitlab received for something I believe they were totally right about, tells you that the more you distance yourself from the mainstream "CV-source" movement, the better. Parasitic programmers and startups complaining that their "dependency graph" might be broken someday because of this, tells you how crap the open source world is right now. Instead of self-hosting, taking the challenge on themselves for something to be proud of, or paying gitlab the equivalent of a couple worth of starbucks lattes a month, they prefer to complain, because they feel way too important.
I dream the day the major hosting providers will say: "no more free plans!" and see those sissies run around about their "open source rights" (or whatever). I'll take the pop-corns.
That's what they deserve, in the end.