GitLab versus The Zombie Repos: An old plot needs a new twist
On the face of it, GitLab has fallen into the Freemium Brand Trap. The logic behind free tiers on a paid-for service is sound enough. If you have a system where the incremental cost of adding a new user is low enough, you can give restricted user access away for free. People can get their feet wet and build useful things; once they see your service as beneficial for larger projects, they can hand over the cash for the full-fat experience.
The trap comes when the cumulative load of free tier users starts to cost more than you planned. If you're a crass commercial outfit, then you can put the screws on and trust that the paying base will keep your profile high and your brand aloft. With open source, you're seen as damaging the community. Because you are.
This is the first problem with the assumption that untouched code is dead code. Open source is built on stable components. Stable means not being fiddled with. But when you do need to revisit long-established code, say because a big yet ancient security flaw has just surfaced, you really need to revisit it. Open source should mean that this is always possible, no matter who used to own the code and what its life story has been since it was looked at.
Those are immediate concerns about vanishing code. Open source also means having code available for research, for education, for whatever unforeseen reasons. Nobody forced GitLab to offer a free service to open source, but it did – and that means a responsibility. It's part of the world's communal memory now.
Noble ideals aren't any good if you can't afford them, though, and a megabuck off the bottom line won't stop bleeding away by itself. Let's look at that figure. Is it legit? You can store a petabyte for up to five years in Fujifilm's Object Archive service for around $45,000, or less than $10k a year, one of the best deals around. GitLab has around 29 million non-active users at 5GB free repo space. That's 145 petabytes, or $1.3 million a year.
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