If your IP (and possible your browser) looks “suspicious” or has been used by other users before, you need to add additional information for registration on gitlab.com, which includes your mobile phone number and possibly credit card information. Since it is not possible to contribute or even report issues on open source projects without doing so, I do not think any open source project should use this service until they change that.
Screenshot: https://i.ibb.co/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
Discourse, Git* and more really need federated search.
It is already hard getting Contributors for projects, even more if you are on some random selfhosted server that nobody finds and everyone needs to create a new account for.
Cool!
Good idea
Funny you mentioned it, till very recently they needed validation by android or i-phone app, assuming all linux/FOSS programmers had one.
Beyond that anonymity becomes impossible for phone registrations.
Gitlab is NOT free software, and neither is GitTea, but Forgejo IS
codeberg and git.disroot use Forgejo not gitea
https://codeberg.org/api/swagger
Ohhh… github is just git.microsoft
Gitlab EE is not a free software but gitlab CE is. Gitea is a free software too. However if you want to stay free, you have to self-host your instances. Even if it is forgejo.
A for profit corporation will never produce anything truly free, it is all done in the name of profit
IBM’s systemd Qt Oracle Google Facebook are all multinational corporations.
Nothing BUT free, they are all dictatorships for the people they employ.
I prefer to follow strict definitions when possible. OSI open source definition in this case.
Also I’m not ready to throw away all software that companies you mentioned conributed to. Did you do this?
Also I’m not ready to throw away all software that companies you mentioned conributed to. Did you do this?
If you want to avoid software from Google and Meta, you’ll need to avoid pretty important parts of the Linux kernel as well as pretty much anything that does hashing or compression (given Google’s involvement with WebP and Brotli, and Meta’s involvement with btrfs, zstd, xxhash64, cgroup2, etc)
Not only kernel, but also many widely used libraries. Including compiler runtimes.
till
'til
Maybe it’s just me, but I never liked GitLab in the first place. The UI is just awful to me. Searching through issues, before posting a new one, is just a pita.
I last used it seriously like 7 or 8 years ago and it was fine. I put it on par with GitHub at the time. The ability to self host for free without too much trouble also really affected my position on it.
I haven’t really enjoyed the few times I’ve had to use it in the last couple of years, though.
The best part of the Gitlab UI is when it gets upgraded and you have to relearn how to find everything.
What, did they source their developers from blender?
You mean GIMP, right?!
Imho, Blender really deserves to be treated with more respect. They’re one of the few ones offering a great product for free. Sure, it might seem a bit overwhelming, but so are most of these 3D programs. It’s just a matter of getting used to… but GIMP, booy oh boy
Blender actually improved its UI though
Pita = Pain in the ass
I remember when gitlab.com was the most accessible alternative to GitHub out there, but it seems they’re only interested in internal enterprise usage now. Their main page was already completely unreadable to someone not versed in enterprise tech marketing lingo, and now this.
Thankfully Gitea and Forgejo have gotten better in the meantime, with Codeberg as a flagship instance of the latter.
For my private repos, hosted on my home server, I moved from Gitlab to Forgejo (Git, artifacts and containers images) and Woodpecker for CI builds. Woodpecker is not as powerful and feature complete as Gitlab, but for simpler needs it gets the job done.
On a tangent, why are all of these companies pushing AI programming? This shit isn’t nearly as functional as they make it seem and all the beginners who try it are constantly asking questions about why their generated code doesn’t work
We are in the hype cycle so everyone is going bananas and there’s money to be made prior to the trough of disillusionment.
Haha so true.
I tried to use chatgpt to convert a monstrosity of a SQL query to a sqlalchemy query and it failed horribly.
the beginners who try it are constantly asking questions about why their generated code doesn’t work
Because it ain’t here to generate all their code for them. It’s a glorified autocomplete and suggestion engine. When are people gonna get this? (not you, just in general)
I use CoPilot myself, but if you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing yourself, you and CoPilot will both quickly hit a dead end together. Books and research using your meatbrain are still very much needed.
Don’t even need to make it about code. I once asked what a term meant in a page full of a certain well known FOSS application’s benchmarks page. It gave me a lot of garbage that was unrelated because it made an assumption about the term, exactly the assumption I was trying to avoid. I try to deviate it away from that, and it fails to say anything coherent and then loops back and gives that initial attempt as the answer again. I was stuck unable from stopping it from hallucinating.
How? Why?
Basically, it was information you could only find by looking at the github code, and it was pretty straightforward - but the LLM sees “benchmark” and it must therefore make a bajillion assumptions.
Even if asked not to.
I have a conclusion to make. It does do the code thing too, and it is directly related. Once asked about a library, and it found a post where someone was ASKING if XYZ was what a piece of code was for - and it gave it out as if it was the answer. It wasn’t. And this is the root of the problem:
AI’s never say “I don’t know”.
It must ALWAYS know. It must ALWAYS assume something, anything, because not knowing is a crime and it won’t commit it.
And that makes them shit.
It’s not in the interest of all the techbros to sell the new age AIshit as something less that can only do such small thing. They need to hype the shit out of it to get all the crazy investors money that understand nothing about it but only see AI buzzwords everywhere and need to go for it now because of FOMO.
It’s only gonna get much worse before it is toned down to appropriate usage.
I’m hyped about AI assisted programming and even agent driven projects (writing their own code, submitting pull requests etc) but I also agree that it seems just too early to actually put money behind it.
Its just so marginal so far, the UI/HMI has too much friction still and the output without skilled programming assistance is too limited.
It’s their wet dream. Making software without programmers.
Because it brings in mad VC funding
VC’s and companies like OpenAI have done a really good job of propagandizing AI (LLMs). People think it’s magical and the future, so there’s money in saying you have it.
Because greedy investors are gullible and want to make money from the jobs they think AI will displace. They don’t know that this shit doesn’t work like they’ve been promised. The C-levels at Gitlab want their money (gotta love publicly traded companies), and nobody is listening to the devs who are shouting that AI is great at writing security vulnerabilities or just like, totally nonfunctioning code.
Fuck GitLab. I used to use it until recently moved all my projects to codeberg. Way better. GitLab is becoming more and more like GitHub.
GitLab is becoming more and more like GitHub.
Well, duh. That’s the sales pitch: “Like GitHub, but cheaper.”
I think github is the cheap knockoff if anything
Yeah I’m not gonna lie GitHub has clearly been trying to keep up with gitlabs feature set not the other way around for years
Except it’s way more expensive than GitHub. They jacked up the prices pretty hard. Now it’s like $15/contributor for private orgs, and it’s like $5 on GitHub for the same and more features.
Except it’s way more expensive than GitHub. They jacked up the prices pretty hard. Now it’s like $15/contributor for private orgs, and it’s like $5 on GitHub for the same and more features.
Free for self-hosting, though.
Forgejo ftw!
Self hosting here, also with runners to create a complete ci/cd line.
Gitlab always sketched me the fuck out.
It’s a lab full of gits, after all
Because it was usable software or because they’re devs and can’t spell for shit? What skeeved you out a decade ago that still persists now (i.e. ‘always’) ?
GitLab used to be awesome when it was the place to go after MS bought out GitHub. They had premium access for all public projects under a FOSS license and top-tier CI. Then as time went on, they began pulling support for various functions in a very Microsoftian EEE sort of way. First requiring credit cards fir new users to access the CI, then taking away the CI almost entirely except for a practically useless monthly allotment, then taking away the premium access for public FOSS licensed projects. If I were migrating today I would not have chosen GitLab, but it is where I settled after leaving GitHub and my projects have grown to depend on GitLab CI even if I’m now forced to run my own runners due to the extreme nerfs they’ve done to the hosted CI. I mirrored OpenRGB to Codeberg, but since the CI pipelines depend on GitLab I don’t see Codeberg becoming the main hub anytime soon unless they can execute GL CI configs. Sad to see how far GitLab has fallen though, it is unrecognizable from what it used to be as far as support for FOSS prohects goes, especially given how GitLab itself started as a FOSS project.
Maybe it’s time to start listing the enshittification phase of a project on Wikipedia or something.
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. - Wikipedia
I created a GitLab account long before they implemented this, but never used it. Went to post an issue related to self-hosted GitLab on their issue tracker, and it told me my account was banned. I wrote an email to support and they essentially said “an automated system identified your account as a bot and banned you during an account clean up some years ago to cut back on malicious users”. I informed them that this was not at all reasonable, as I’ve never even posted anything on any GitLab account, and that I would be advising my organization to never pay for any GitLab product or service unless legal writes up the contract terms, because I have no faith in them as a vendor.
Seriously, fuck GitLab. And if anyone from that org wants to discuss this with me, they can pipe their email to
/dev/nullStop telling me what to do! You’re not my mom.
Don’t be so sure about that my son
Policies like that are almost entirely about minimizing fraud and harassment. It really sucks for people who don’t have mobile phones that support authentication texts or whatever (since, even as you pointed out, the requirement is mostly a phone number) but it also drastically cuts down on fake/harassment accounts.
It’s disgusting.
It should be illegal to require any personal information unless you can prove that it’s literally impossible to provide your service without it, and always illegal to share that information with anyone (but a payment provider exclusively for verification purposes) for any reason.
Even Github does not require any personal information, so there are certainly other ways.
And Github is Microsoft who need those capabilities for basically every other website they sell.
Whereas gitlab is REALLY good software with… a website nobody ever really asked for but that still needs to exist to sell people that software.
This comes up with a lot of services. I think everyone lost their god damned minds when overwatch added phone verification?
Like, I don’t like it. But I have friends who ahve had to deal with harassment campaigns against their products (or persons) and the like and get why you would do what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask as a way to remove sock puppets.
Except phone number is super cheap.
It is still a monetary investment which is a major deterrent to bad faith accounts. This is why so many live games have a “you need to spend 1 dollar to get into the good queue” model. Shit like Escape from Tarkov where people buy accounts en masse are very much the exception.
But also? The issue is, like with mots things, lower income users. A lot of the cheaper/more affordable “pay as you go” phone plans won’t support the SMS authentication services that these models depend on. Which is why I referenced Overwatch 2 since that was actually a really “good” example of the reasons this is not a good model.
TF2. Even in official competetive mm with phone verification and spending money there are lots of bots.
won’t support the SMS authentication services that these models depend on.
Is it even legal?
There is no one solution that handles everything (or else everyone would just do that). It is always about a mixture of multiple methods.
Is it even legal?
This is the internet. Someone will always claim it is illegal in “Europe”. Nobody will care enough to verify one way or the other. And, regardless of whether it is or is not, companies don’t care because most of those regulations are very toothless either due to bureaucratic inertia or just not giving a fuck.
The fact of the matter is that this is a very common model used by a range of services and it is not going to get challenged any time soon.
what, on the surface, is a pretty trivial ask
I don’t think having my real life phone number tied to a website or game account is a trivial ask. I’d like my data to be private, especially something as real-life and tangible as a fucking phone number. Sure, there are ways around these things, you can get a fake phone number for cheap (or possibly even free), but that’s rather more effort than I’m willing to put in for most things. If I need to enter a phone number to sign up for an account for something, chances are very extremely good I’ll just decide I don’t need the account that badly. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
It’s about data harvesting and selling not safety or any other mentioned.
Gitlab was getting attacked with thousands of spam accounts. Trying to fix the damage almost killed the company
User flagging works too
Remember seeing this a while ago. Is this something they’re still doing or did they backpedal?
Edit: Oh wait, it’s affecting OP. I apparently can’t read.
This is wild 💀
Screenshot: https://removed/XsfcfHf/gitlab.png
For LW users after scumbags used image hosters to spread childprn:
Gitlab when they successfully created artificial dependency and can then demand money for even the most basic of services:
Tried to register with gitlab three times some months back to file a bug against qemu. It rejected my registration silently every time (as in, it appeared to take it but never sent a confirmation email, not even one that got mistaken for spam). I gave up on filing the bug.
