> but I'm not sure why many are even remotely surprised by these sort of escapades
I don't think people are surprised that these things are possible in the context of "EaaS". It's surprising because they're causing massive problems for their users by making the change so quickly. The relative gain of waiting one month before the change wouldn't hurt them that much, but it would help their customers a great deal. So the surprise is seeing how indifferent they seem to the users. (I know they're revising the decision now. Maybe they can avoid most of the bad PR.)
The free or partially free dev tool industry is extremely competitive and you need a lot of goodwill to stay alive. They're completely free to screw their users, and their users are completely free (except for some lock-in) to hop to the next provider. I don't understand why they would throw away that goodwill.
But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.
> But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.
It may be for a lot of users. But some people are GitHub refugees and only started using Gitlab relatively recently. I am one of those, and haven't been using Gitlab for long enough to have any serious friction against moving away from it.
I don't think people are surprised that these things are possible in the context of "EaaS". It's surprising because they're causing massive problems for their users by making the change so quickly. The relative gain of waiting one month before the change wouldn't hurt them that much, but it would help their customers a great deal. So the surprise is seeing how indifferent they seem to the users. (I know they're revising the decision now. Maybe they can avoid most of the bad PR.)
The free or partially free dev tool industry is extremely competitive and you need a lot of goodwill to stay alive. They're completely free to screw their users, and their users are completely free (except for some lock-in) to hop to the next provider. I don't understand why they would throw away that goodwill.
But maybe I'm wrong and the friction is higher than what I expect.