GitLab Had Begun Planning To Track Its Users But Quickly Changed Course

[josh_walrath]

In particular, I suspect most large corporations running EE with code for unreleased/unannounced products would not be fans. :) Honestly, it seems so obvious that most of their paying enterprise customers would be opposed to this that I'm really surprised they made such an obvious blunder.

What were you thinking here? https://youtu.be/bf9nXS9rmuw?t=188

Legitimately curious.

[deusexmachina]

GitLab runs Chef in all of its containers! 0_0
GitLab's docker-compose.yml files don't even have a version at the top after months of being asked in their docs... I don't know how anyone is tricked into thinking they're devops experts... They just seem incompetent.

[Vistaus]

Yet a lot of FOSS people don't care as GitLab is the Holy Grail no matter what they do and GitHub is evil b/c Microsoft.

[DMJC]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. You think these people are a charity handing out free servers expecting nothing in return? LOL how naive.

[cl333r]

But then how does Gitlab make money? How do they pay the bills for electricity, servers and sysadmins?

[HadrienG]

Am I the only one wondering why they sent that e-mail instead of just silently rolling out the tracker like every other website out there does?

That was surprisingly honest... some would say suicidally so.

[Shtirlic]

This case looks pretty clear to me, they want to track data, but it's not their primary business so they can not afford building in house analytics/statistics/tracking software and decided to use 3rd party solution. Now they should develop in-house solution or abandon this ideas at all.

[Luke]

There's no such thing as a free lunch. You think these people are a charity handing out free servers expecting nothing in return? LOL how naive.

Actually even the worst ad-supported sites make most of their money from very few of their users. Free users provide the marketshare to attract the users who actually generate income (by clicking on ads, subscribing, etc).

I would actually PREFER that there had never, ever been at any time in the past been any sort of "free" (as in you are the product) cloud hosting, social media sites, etc. That would have forced the majority of Internet users to self-host all their cat videos, blogs, etc on their own hardware so as to avoid paying yet another monthly bill. That in turn would have meant no residential ISP could attempt to prohibit "running a website" without going out of business.

Sweat and hardware equity, not ads and trackers

[RealNC]

Whenever I see a mandatory pop-up on a site that says something like "we care about your privacy", I'm reminded of countries with the word "democratic" in their name. Guess what the one thing they are not is...

So when one of those pop-up to tell me how much they care about my privacy, there's a long text underneath, listing all the things that make it clear they don't give a fsck about my privcacy

[Delgarde]

I would actually PREFER that there had never, ever been at any time in the past been any sort of "free" (as in you are the product) cloud hosting, social media sites, etc. That would have forced the majority of Internet users to self-host all their cat videos, blogs, etc on their own hardware so as to avoid paying yet another monthly bill.

Surely you have things backward? That's exactly how things were originally... way, way back. The "free" hosting services came about precisely because they discovered they could make money out of providing a service that the user didn't have to pay for.