It's kind of inherent on a website that's a side project of a venture capital firm.
Besides, without monetisation, you're relying on the goodwill of a surprisingly small number of people. I like to call this "Postel decentralisation" - in the early days of the internet before IANA was the bureaucracy it is today, a lot of functions which people might naievely assume were decentralised were in fact done by hand by John Postel.
This is curious to me. You either run a charity or a business. Is that sickening?
OSS is huge on HN, and a ton of HN users release OSS all the time. Yet, we all have bills to pay, and a lot of us look for ways to make money as well. Food and whatnot.
I'm not really sure what you're objecting to here? You make it sound like because a user talked about monetizing a feature to a hypothesized product that they're the same as a pharmaceutical company with life-needing medication forcing users to pay absurd amounts.
I agree that in certain scenarios how you monetize matters heavily. Yet, I can't help but feel that only applies to freedom and life-essentials. Things like basic internet access and medications.
But a git hosting service? In my view, you could open one and make it as colossally greedy as you like. It seems you disagree with this, can you voice your thoughts in more depth?
The irony of people using fast Internet (often on a fast mobile network), using fast computers, on sites like HN/FB/Twitter, etc, typically with a full belly and in an air conditioned room, to speak about the evils of the capitalistic spirit, always amuses me.
Some of us have bills to pay. This generally isn’t a hobby, but a profession. Until rainbows and good vibes pay the rent, then yes, monetization is important.
To explain some of my sickening tendencies: I'm not associated with any such for-profit hosting site, so I have nothing to gain from this. I just use them.
Implementing such a feature would cost resources that someone would have to pay for. Storage costs would go up, it's not atypical that e.g. a repo that's 100MB on disk might be 1.5x or 2x that (or beyond) if you were keeping every version of every ref ever. Think e.g. accumulating throwaway topic branches with library imports you never ended up using.
So how do you pay for running such a thing, nevermind the initial development cost?
You could just make it "free", but then you'd need to roll the cost onto customers across the board. Or you could only enable such "backups" for opt-in paying customers, but most people aren't going to think to enable/pay for that, or think "I won't need this", until they day they do.
So wouldn't it be neat to have such a service on in the background, funded by high premiums to recover the data in case their backup version is your last option?
I've certainly permanently lost personal data by accident where I'd wished I could have paid hundreds of dollars to get back, nevermind someone for whom such a thing might be of critical business importance.
Think about it as being able to pay money after-the-fact to undo the car crash you just got into. With technology that becomes feasible in some cases, and in particular due to how git stores data & what people tend to store there it's relatively cheap compared to some other types of storage.
Besides, without monetisation, you're relying on the goodwill of a surprisingly small number of people. I like to call this "Postel decentralisation" - in the early days of the internet before IANA was the bureaucracy it is today, a lot of functions which people might naievely assume were decentralised were in fact done by hand by John Postel.