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.
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.