Gitlab are a corporation, sure - but they're also software developers.
We-the-software-industry have long had something of a contradiction: Everybody wants to make a 6-figure salary developing software - but nobody wants to pay for a library or a database or a compiler or a linter or an OS or an IDE or a debugger or a code signing certificate, even if it's only $100/year.
If you're launching a new database, it's not enough to give the binaries away for free - developers want the full source code too, and an unlimited commercial use license. And of course, nobody will want to commit their data to it if you imply there won't be 10+ years of free updates and bugfixes. You're going to ask for donations? You'd better not do it too aggressively.
Except for a tiny handful of megacorporations like Amazon, and one or two products like Jetbrains IDEs, nobody refuses to pay developers quite like other developers.
1. A strange reluctance to financially support important software projects
2. Insistence on Free and Open Source software
I agree the first point is a legitimate failing of the software community, such as it is. I get the impression only a few percent of software professionals (or for that matter software-powered organisations) have ever, say, financially supported a FOSS project.
The second point though is not a failing. The problems with non-Free software are very apparent.
I mean, someone who is fitting bathrooms or writing books or teaching piano will say "here are my wares, here are my prices" and the customers will pay.
But the major open source licenses all say "here are my wares, no charge, feel free to redistribute to all your friends too" - of course they're not paying, I just told them they don't have to pay.
If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?
One is a concern about freedom, the other is being a cheapskate. They're very different positions.
Plenty of people donate to FOSS projects or to associated organisations like the FSF and OSI, but it's a shame the numbers aren't higher by a few orders of magnitude.
Monetising Free and Open Source software is unfortunately not always easy, but it's not as if it never happens. Most Linux kernel contributions are from paid kernel developers, for instance. Some projects make money from paid support services (LibreOffice, RedHat), or offering a hosted deployment of the software (SourceHut).
> If I'm hoping that Amazon and Oracle and Facebook and Wal-Mart are going to pay $$$$$$$ to me and hundreds of my peers out of a sense of charity and generosity - doesn't that seem rather naive?
You're right that there's nothing to stop a major cloud provider from making easy money offering a managed service powered by FOSS, then giving little to nothing back to the project itself.
This is the reason mongoDB is unfortunately no longer using a FOSS licence.
It seems you've misheard then. Any vendor is saying "here are my services, here are my prices" and customers will pay (the real customers that is).
The open source licenses are part of the deal but not an intrinsic part of the business, hence the distinction makes sense.
It's up to us engineers to say: (1) I demand source code for my own benefit; (2) hey dude, pay for a RHEL subscription, apparently that money/power trickles to the actual engineers that do useful things for my own benefit! The rest of the world simply does not know about these two types of benefit if engineers don't speak. For (2), it's understandable that people think RHEL subscription is just 100% money wasted if they don't go opening any support tickets. Where instead maybe 90% of the money does go to execs but 10% benefits back the FOSS users around the world, figuratively speaking.
Also, there are plenty of good FOSS projects that aren't seeing much corporate use, such as perhaps KDE.
(Although Google are known for using Linux as a desktop OS, perhaps including KDE, I'm not certain.)
You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
> if the linux kernel became paid
Like another comment I just replied to, [0] this conflates software freedom with price. Proprietary forks are often shunned as a lot of people care that the software they use have a Free and Open Source licence. This happens whether or not they're made available to download free of charge.
Also, the Linux kernel uses the GPLv2 licence, so non-Free forks are not permitted.
> they don't do it for charity.
Right, of course. When business interests can align with the interests of Free and Open Source projects, that's a good thing.
> You also agree that software solutions that are not fun to build can succeed as freely available Free and Open Source projects.
Yeah, I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions. But the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid, as the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free.
Well, no, they'd use the other Free and Open Source Unix-like kernels, in particular FreeBSD. If we woke up tomorrow and there were no Free and Open Source kernels around at all, we would of course want to create one. This is why the Hurd kernel was started, after all. [0]
There are already various non-Free kernels out there. Windows is the obvious one, but also HP-UX and Oracle Solaris. There are also some freely available proprietary kernels, such as Menuet 64.
> you will never find a lack of free compilers, OS's, programming languages etc
It's fun to dabble in those fields, but doing serious work in compiler engineering or operating systems is just that: serious work. Major FOSS projects are very often powered largely by paid developers with specialized skills.
> since companies wants a free OS for their servers they would start to contribute to whatever OS that looks the most promising, we would have another free big OS for most service needs running very quickly
Hopefully we would, yes.
> I should have said "most products that aren't fun aren't free", there are exceptions
Not really, no. The list includes the Linux kernel, MySQL, Postgres, OpenJDK, GCC, LLVM, Chromium, and Firefox. Those aren't mere exceptions, and they're not the kind of software that can be achieved on a have-a-go basis.
> the main point is that developers using these free products in no way clashes with developers getting paid
Right, as I've been saying, business interests can align with those of a FOSS project, hopefully benefiting both so that sustainable progress can be made.
> the things 99.9% of developers are paid to work on aren't things they use for free
It's not clear what you're saying here. You're right that most paid software work is not released as FOSS. A lot of paid software work is on software that isn't intended for use by software developers, so they're never going to be the user anyway.
It's because "I could probably just do it myself" (or someone gives away their work for free as a résumé portfolio piece and that becomes the de facto standard)
I think we also have to discuss the elephant in the room, that these businesses are layered on top of free software, so they are effectively reselling (and attempting to profit from) something that is free, so it's unsurprising that people's expectations when considering using open source software is that they don't need to pay for it.
GitLab is an 8 year old underdog that's trying to push the limits of software development support and they made a change that affects "fewer than 2% of Free tier users within 0.3% of namespaces."[1] Maybe they don't know wtf they're doing but who does in this space? It's relatively new, competition is frantic, and companies are trying things. Maybe they always were planning on doing this, but maybe there were unintended consequences to offering this wide open free tier and they need to correct to stay solvent.
Whatever the reason you're absolutely right: If you don't like the product, don't use it. That 2% of the freeriders weren't going to convert anyway so losing them (and a few of their cheerleaders) from the funnel won't hurt them at all, because in the end they supply excellent value to the other 98% of their base.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
Have you considered that (and the article mentions this) the employees of said corporations, people like you and I, also want to be paid for their labor?
Do something really well for fun? Just a cool admirable hobby. The second you start to do it for money it becomes a job and people will judge you in a completely different light.
As usual money ruins everything.
>we are offering this for free as a company. no guarantees
if you think one's criticizable and the other one isn't I don't know what to tell you
The sole point of a corporate entity is to make money. That's the whole point. There's no reason to assume otherwise unless it's a clear non-profit organization.
People don't make a company out of the goodness of their heart. Hell, they wouldn't even open one if they didn't have to do it to pay taxes. Speaking from experience here.
Companies need to make money. Not billions of dollars in profits like Google, Amazon, Tesla, etc. But they need to at least make money to keep their services up, and then pay their employees decent wages. Otherwise they literally go bankrupt.
Software is unique in that it basically costs $0 to distribute infinity copies. Sure you may need to periodically update and host your software, but you don't really need to do that and it usually basically costs $0 to update and host anyways. As a result, most software is free! We have entire operating systems, IDEs, professional-grade tools (e.g. Blender), game engines all for free, because they can be maintained on low budgets and people's spare time. And this is how it should be, software should be free.
But this leads lots of developers to expect that everything should be free, when this is flat-out impossible. You can't expect your food, heating, clothes, etc. to be free because they cost physical resources to produce. You can't expect Google to sell laptops for free. Similarly, you can't expect hosting providers to sell storage for free, because it actually does cost resources to run those servers. GitLab has to pay for more hard drives, maintenance, electricity, rent, etc. as more people use their service, and as people use more of their services.
Blender doesn't really have to pay more whether 1,000 or 1,000,000 people use it, GitLab does. Linux doesn't really have to pay every month to keep their kernel online, GitLab does.
And yeah, companies like GitLab have paid tiers. The issue is that almost nobody uses them, even when they really should. People love to buy "free" stuff, even if something costs $1 you will have far less people buy it. Hence, why we have this entire culture of companies "buying" you via ads and tracking. They do it because consumers encourage ads and tracking in their spending habits,
And yeah, companies do have marketing. Another thing software developers don't like to accept is that companies need to market, you can have the best product but without marketing you will sell it to noone. Marketing doesn't mean spammy advertisements and aggressive tracking, there are good ways to advertise your product (like posting an in-depth review to HN with benefits and drawbacks). And marketing absolutely doesn't count as "payment". That attitude is like those influencers asking for services in exchange for "you'll be paid in reputation and experience"!
You're absolutely right that nobody needs to use GitLab, and if nobody uses it GitLab will shut down. If all developers team up and decide that they won't use GitLab unless they offer everything free, then they will shut down. Do you want that to happen? Boycotts are good when you're boycotting something like Battlefront 2 for ridiculous micro-transactions, where EA actually has the resources to scale back (and if they don't, it is they're fault, because they're charging $60 for the base game), and a competitor can form and take over. But if you boycott companies with reasonable policies for making anything paid whatsoever, you're going to end up with 0 hosting providers, no competitor is going to appear, because they simply can't exist without going broke.
I'm just saying, this is a commercial relationship.
When my bank raises it's fee's I complain, but I probably won't move bank.
When I go get a coffee and they're like, 'sorry, to cover our costs the coffee is 50c more', I'm like... eh; we have a friendly relationship and I'll just wear it.
...but, and here's the thing:
If I went to get a coffee, and they were like, sorry, you have pay an extra $5 for the sugar; you think it's unreasonable and entitled to complain about that? After all the years of free sugar, surely I should just support them in these times and pay and extra $5 for the sugar on my coffee.
People going there... could complain. Or take no sugar. Or choose a different coffee shop. Honestly, it's up to them. It's pretty reasonable to feel a bit upset though, I think, in that situation.
So, my sympathy does not extend to companies that do this.
You have costs to cover? Well, I'm sure you'll figure something out. You'll probably lose some customers and gain some others. Maybe it'll work out; maybe it won't.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for companys in this situation; it is a situation of their own engineering. If it works out, it works out. If not, they'll die. It's the way of the world.
They don't need my, or anyone else's, sympathy.
100% agreed, therefore, we should keep emotions out of it.
> People going there... could complain. Or take no sugar. Or choose a different coffee shop. Honestly, it's up to them. It's pretty reasonable to feel a bit upset though, I think, in that situation.
Exactly, they can just leave, pick an alternative. Why do they take to social media and cry about it? What do they expect to gain this way?
> You have costs to cover? Well, I'm sure you'll figure something out. You'll probably lose some customers and gain some others. Maybe it'll work out; maybe it won't.
Indeed they have just figured it out - they started charging for sugar. They will lose customers, most likely, but I don't believe they haven't seen that. I'd wager that it's the customers who got caught by surprise, and our now making a big deal out of it.
In short, I agree that we shouldn't have any sympathy for the companies in this case - it's just that I'd extend that to the users as well.
You use free software every day. No matter how legit the argument is tomorrow your Linux became a subscription, I think you'd be a little miffed.
But the deeper issue is why they had to offer free tier in the first place. I highly doubt GitLab could’ve achieved nearly as much people even if they charged $1. And that’s a bad thing, because then their competitor (GitHub) would be even more dominant and be able to push more ads/other dark patterns without users leaving because they have nowhere to go.
The bottom line is that organizations which don’t just sell software but tangible resources (servers = storage and compute = tangible) need to make money. You shouldn’t blame them for charging. Yeah they shouldn’t be taking free tier stuff away, but GitLab may literally not be able to afford keeping it up. Linux is never going to not afford not becoming a subscription.
Good! The less adoption of these productized solutions, the more self-hosted instances there will be. The less attractive browser signup flow is, the more attractive download this VM image or run this Ansible (etc) playbook becomes.
These companies are running a bait and switch where they draw users in with ease of getting started, and then gradually turn up the restrictions and extraction while friction keeps users from moving away. Your appeal basically boils down to Gitlab being the underdog to Github which did this despicable thing first.
These companies are a pox on the efforts of free software. Recently, Github proactively disabled the accounts of anybody that contributed to a piece of software used by a sanctioned entity, never mind their numerous repository takedowns over the years. The discussions are full of people arguing to what degree the lawyers had to do that, while basically accepting the top-down control as a foregone conclusion. That's one hell of an attractive nuisance to the detriment of software freedom.
Why should they want those people if they're so entitled anyways? For the good PR? Why are they entitled to that?
As far as I see this, Gitlab offered something for the good PR, and now they want to stop offering it and still keep the good PR. Sorry Gitlab, but you're not entitled to not have me talk shit about you. Feel free to stop offering free services, but don't expect anything from me in return.
Seriously?
Look, when you give something away for free, you’re either a charity or you’re marketing your non-free tier products and using your large user base to drive premium users.
If a company has committed too much to their free tier and it is not sustainably driving premium users, I have little sympathy for them.
You did a marketing thing.
It didn’t work.
Sucks to be you. You are still not getting my business. I do not feel sorry for you when people lash you on Twitter and promise to leave.
There’s no reason to feel sorry for companys in this situation; it is a situation of their own engineering.
If you don’t like the product, don’t use it.
If enough people don’t use it, the conversion funnel will dry up and the company will change tunes (again).
The only thing to take note of here is, yes: if you’re not paying for it, you are the product. Feel free to grumble about it and call out these companies, but don’t be surprised about it.
> The common thread here: Lots of users expect to get things for free, forever, from for-profit companies that don’t answer to them. Those users contribute almost nothing1 to the bottom line for the for-profit companies, and actively drive up costs for them.
Please, spare me.
Those users are part of the conversion funnel to paid tier users.
Gitlab would not exist without them.
If they piss them all off and they leave, it will contribute, I’d wager, significantly the total evaporation of their bottom line.