GitLab isn’t going to delete inactive projects anyway

GitLab has reversed its decision to remove inactive projects starting at the end of September. The unused repositories go to cheaper object storage, so they will still be accessible, but read times on the servers will be longer.

GitLab wanted to save a million dollars a year in hosting costs with the plans and report yourself the rate change. GitLab itself doesn’t yet know what the definition of “inactive” is in this context. “Probably all writes would keep a project running. Raising an issue, a merge request, pushing changes to a branch, etc.” light Dutch GitLab co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij.

The changed plans are according to The Register not very concrete yet, because the plan for removal would have been there for some time. At the end of July, the code to automatically delete projects was ready, “after months of debate and development.” The change of course comes, according to sources from The Register, because of the “anger that was expressed on Twitter and Reddit.” Also in the reactions under the Tweakers news article on this subject, people were predominantly negative about the strategy.

GitLab is a DevOps platform that is seen as a major competitor to repository platform GitHub. GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, much to the dismay of many users. GitLab is the only major standalone player in the repository market since Bitbucket was acquired by Atlassian.