They will have to import their repo's into GitLab. This means that all their urls will change. This is quite unfortunate but we hope they'll appreciate the improved interface and features that GitLab brings such as a great merge request flow. Please let me know if you have any specific concerns.

I'm concerned about losing access to public projects that are not actively maintained, and thus won't make the transition to GitLab. Is it possible to leave Gitorious online in read-only mode after the May deadline?

Unfortunately that is not possible because of the hosting costs for Gitorious.org. We're reaching out to archive.org to index everything but it is probably not easy to git clone from there. Feel free to create mirrors of things that are important.

Wouldn't it be possible to migrate the git repositories automatically, and set up redirects?

Destroying what might be the only public repository of some projects, and breaking a ton of existing links, is not something that sounds good.

We don't want to move people's code without them agreeing with that move to another organization. But I agree the broken links are not nice. I'm not sure how practical it is to redirect projects that moved themselves.

Might it be possible to at least store copies on gitlab - say, have a project/user/organisation called gitorious with every gitorious project under it? I can't admit that I know just how much stuff is hosted on gitorious, but it might not be too onerous.

It is about 4.5TB that is hosted there and we don't want to move people's code to another organization and domain without asking.

Edit: I updated the size, it was not 12TB but 4.5

Are redirects that expensive? How about giving the domain to another entity that is willing to pick up the hosting and/or redirection costs?

Redirects can be a lot of work if there are many and you need to find out where to redirect too.

It would be awesome if an other individual or organization is willing to sponsor the hosting costs so we could keep it open longer, if so please email me at sytse@gitlab.com or comment here.

>How about giving the domain to another entity that is willing to pick up the hosting and/or redirection costs?

GitLab bought Gitorious so they could shut it down, not so they could give it to someone else. That is the purpose of acquisitions within the same field.

The main reason for the acquisition is to give and communicate a clear upgrade path for existing Gitorious users. If someone wants to pay for the hosting costs to keep gitorious.org running longer we'd be happy to do that. Please email me at sytse@gitlab.com or comment here if you're interested.

>The main reason for the acquisition is to give and communicate a clear upgrade path for existing Gitorious users.

That's a pretty disingenuous thing to say when it seems like the only reason an "upgrade path" is needed in the first place is because of the acquisition and shutdown.

Edit: Even with Gitorious being "no longer sustainable" in its current form, there are other methods that could have been used (price adjustments, fundraising, etc) rather than an outright and very short-term shutdown.

Responding after the edit. Price adjustments and fundraising make sense when a project is alive and growing, but Gitorious had been seeing less and less contributions over the last few years.