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Comment by DouweM | Hacker News Reader

The GitLab EE source is publicly viewable, but its license is not open source. See https://about.gitlab.com/2015/05/22/gitlab-7-11-released/.

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This is really a problem I think. Maybe GitLab could reconsider to adopt a licensing model[1] for the Enterprise Edition that would make it more Free Software friendly?

[1] I.e. a licensing model based on GPL and selling services that Red Hat uses for RHEL, instead of a licensing model like they, and a minority of the "open source" companies, use.

When we introduced the Enterprise Edition we had it under MIT license. This caused much confusion with our customers. Maybe the situation is better now with companies like Hortonworks educating the market. But unlike others we want to make our open source edition as simple to install and maintain as the paid version.

Anyway, maybe you could be a bit more specific about the problem you see with our model, I would love to get specific. Also see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

BTW I presume RedHat choose a GPL license for RHEL because they didn't have a choice due to the GPL license on Linux.

My understanding from taking a Red Hat sysadmin course is that what you get from a RHEL subscription is firstly access to their repos from which to download updates and additional packages. The other, perhaps bigger, portion of a RHEL subscription is the support; I think they will answer the phone and provide you fixes for any bugs in RHEL-provided software relatively quickly. This is nice for companies, for whom uptime and stability are often superior to most other concerns, like staying close in feature parity to upstream.

We want to give people using GitLab CE an awesome upgrade experience too https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 so limiting our packages server to just EE is not an option.

We tried charging only for support but now that we have the Omnibus packages it is rare for users to need support (and we like it that way).

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