Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to Gitlab you install on your hardware.

I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money.

A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.

(This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".)

Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run. It is more productive for society to give away limited product offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns.

If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)

The real world is way more nuanced than this. Many "free" offerings are not monetization through ads or likewise, they are marketing strategies, and they're good for both company and consumers as they allow evaluation periods with no committment, and in some cases use the business/enterprise revenue to subsidize individual users, which benefits individual users.

You can excuse or justify it however you want. But it's still false and deceptive advertising to use "free" in situations like this.

To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying in data.

Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license, which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that statement.

instead of "free" what term/expression should the company use for their "free" tier?

Demo or freeware.

Personally I prefer demo, because it's a demonstration of what you can expect.

Demo is interesting, although it nearly always implies limited functionality and/or limited timeframe you can use the software, which may be misleading for some free tiers.

Freeware could be a good term, but wouldn't it still have the same nothing-is-free issue that GP brought up calling it "false and deceptive advertising"? The term certainly doesn't connote the "why" behind the offering

Agreed. And they should be marketed as 'temporary free', 'limited free' not as 'free'.

Shouldn’t paid plans then be “temporary $4,95”? I mean, they still can screw you with “$5,45” any time.

> And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.

or they use "free" to nuke competitors from orbit, salt the ground to ensure nobody can get a dime for a decade in this industry, hoard all the expertise then increase your pricing by orders of magnitude like it happened with Google Maps.

We used to enforce monopoly regulations, and similar types of anticompetitive behaviors that kill swaths of markets. And that's exactly what happened with what you described with Google maps.

This scheme is basically dumping, where you (a company) lower the price of your good and then flood the market to kill all competitors. Then when they're good and dead, you jack up the prices to extortionate levels and sit back and get piles of money, from people with no choice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

The last big antitrust push we had was against Microsoft. And after the judge was replaced for improper communication during trial, MS and DoJ settled. Basically, was a huge case then "Oops nevermind".