The distinction here about free CI for public project is critically important for Open Source projects like my own, Samba.
I realize that, because we do not pay, we are the product, not the customer.
However, I think we do bring a value to the platform, and while I’m not asking (but of course would appreciate) that we get unlimited free CI forever, we need to know what the rules will be, and when they will apply from.
Significant financial, planning and infrastructure decisions rest on understanding clearly the plan here. Samba is a massive user of GitLab CI, using (at an estimate, because of the mentioned bug) in the order of 720,000 mins of CI pipeline a month. If this was all to fall to our own runners (which we use for some jobs, and as a backup when we are throttled) or we started paying for CI mins, it would cost us considerably!
Again, we have appreciated the generosity to date but need a clear direction from GitLab.com so we can make our own plans!
Furthermore in general, 400mins would not be enough for even a single Samba CI run (they take 1200min), so I can’t imagine many new contributors being willing to first pay GitLab to contribute to Samba.
It is not possible, so far, to run guest MRs against our CI runners, but this means even the newest contributors need to be brought into our group first-up. This will be an issue more broadly.
Therefore, what I ask is for a new timeframe to be set before which no CI on public projects will be charged, and between now and then a clearly communicated plan for what the charges will be and how it will work for projects like Samba.
It is not practical for us to plan based on the indefinite date a bug gets fixed.