>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.
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.