GitLab planned to automatically delete projects that were inactive for a year, but now it seems to have changed its mind

On August 4, The Register, citing its own sources, reported that from September, GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they were inactive for a year and belong to users of Free levels. This news caused a significant response, and on August 5, representatives of GitLab, without refuting the previously announced intentions, said that they would only archive such projects in a slower storage.

On August 4, it became known from the Register's own media sources that GitLab plans to automatically delete projects if they were inactive for a year and belong to users of Free levels. The policy was supposed to come into force in September 2022.The publication says that it has seen internal discussions of GitLab, which confirmed that the automation code for removing inactive projects was completed in July and it is ready for deployment. The news about the likely innovations of GitLab was perceived negatively by users.On August 5, GitLab said that the company "discussed internally what to do with inactive repositories." In the end, they decided that "they will still be available, but their loading will be slower after a long period of inactivity." Details

The main reason for GitLab's innovations (namely the removal of projects) was called finance by the media. Inactive projects supposedly account for up to a quarter of GitLab's hosting costs, and automatic deletion can save the service up to a million dollars a year.

According to the publication, it was assumed that users of the platform would only need one comment published in the project within 12 months to maintain it at the active level.

GitLab's alleged plan to remove projects was criticized by Jeff Huntley, an open source advocate and member of the open .NET community .he described the policy as "absolutely wild."

"The source code doesn't take up much disk space. Deleting all this code means destroying the community. They're going to destroy their brand. Of course, there is no guarantee that the code will always be placed there, but the unwritten rules of open source are that you make it available and don't delete it," he told The Register.

The GitLab pricing model document states: "free users increase our overall user base, and a large base expands our ecosystem and increases the status of the platform. The intersection of personal use with organizational use and bottom-up growth is impossible without our free product."