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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, the enterprise edition (EE) used to be open source but is now closed [1]. There is an open source "community edition" which has many of the features of the enterprise edition, including self hosting, but lacks others [2].

While I find it unfortunate that GitLab doesn't have it's enterprise edition open sourced, I think they have enough goodwill in the community so that I'm not that angry about it. I would really be interested in hearing from the GitLab folk whether they think making their enterprise edition open source would really hurt their income and if they have any plans on eventually releasing their enterprise edition as open source (again).

TLDR; GitLab has an open core business model.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitLab#History

[2] https://about.gitlab.com/features/

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Thanks, I agree with the TLDR. Note that our Enterprise Edition has always been closed source.

Making the Enterprise Edition open source would really hurt our income and we have no plans to do so. Our idea is that we want to provide great packaging for the open source edition so that people don't need support. So the only thing we can charge for is features.

I thought the EE was open source: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee

From the LICENSE file [1] to your link:

    ...
    This software and associated documentation files (the "Software") may only be
    used if you (and any entity that you represent) have agreed to, and are in
    compliance with, the GitLab Subscription Terms of Service, available at
    https://about.gitlab.com/terms/#subscription (the “EE Terms”), and otherwise
    have a valid GitLab Enterprise Edition subscription for the correct number of
    user seats. ...

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/LICENSE

you can look at the source, but it is not "open source": https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/LICENSE

Isn't that open source though? Sure you have to pay, but you get access to the source and you can modify it and use your modified version as long as you pay.

Isn't this the vision that Stallman had about open source or free software and copy left?

I would consider this Open Source, but not Free Software.

Free Software according to Stallman's vision includes the right to distribute your modifications. You are not allowed to do that with GitLab EE.

There is a canonical definition of open source by the OSI[1]

This is generally called source available or public source, like the Unreal Engine, rather than open source, which implies you can actually do something with that source code.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Source_Definition

You could modify it if you wanted, but the best way is to submit a Merge Request on GitLab.com, otherwise you will need to maintain a fork of GitLab (which might be a trouble to maintain depending on the changes).

You can only modify it legally if you have an active license though, assuming I'm reading the software license correctly.

If Gitlab EE was open source, they would have seen broad adoption in a lot of free software communities because the quality is much higher than the existing infrastructure (think Gnome, KDE, Freedesktop.org, Apache, maybe even smaller projects like Document Foundation and VideoLAN). However, they made crucial functionality all these projects depend on, like LDAP support, proprietary. So we are still in this situation where most open source ecosystems are running horrible old or outdated infrastructure with random bug trackers and mediawiki on the side, or much less intuitive systems for multi-project ecosystems like Phabricator (which is what KDE is switching to).

I wouldn't call that goodwill. Some people might be able to personally use the community edition, but no open source project of scale could fathom it with how much groupware functionality is locked behind the proprietary version.

But suppose they do open source EE. How do they make money then? They can't pay employees with "thanks" from the community. Donations don't cut it. Consultancy doesn't scale; see the other discussion thread. GitLab would go under or would have to be forced to scale back development significantly. I don't think anybody really benefits from that long-term.

Large free software communities have a choice of course. They can use an alternative (but which one? they are all inferior to GitLab as far as I can see), or they can fork GitLab CE and add the features they need themselves. But let's not kid ourselves that open sourcing GitLab EE is good for the community in the long term.

They could still sell EE even if it's open source.

* Put up a few apt/yum repositories with the EE omnibus packages and charge for access and support.

* Offer private off-prem SaSS.

* Offer on-prem managed hosting for a premium.

* For a hefty premium let companies sponsor features. (i.e Company A needs feature X so they pay you to add it to EE).

The literal software isn't the thing you sell, you sell the ease of use and maintenance.

Especially if they licensed EE under AGPL, very few companies would touch it to host private repos.

1 won't last. Some random dev out there will manually replicate it for free as a side project.

2 & 3 will pay for some ops people who will have no time for anything but ops work.

4 will pay for 4 devs working on features tops. It suffers from the tragedy of the commons that all sponsor-ware does. Company A will only pay GitLab if they are too desperate to wait for someone else to do it and they think it will be a huge discount compared to doing it themselves and keeping it internal.

Thanks for the thinking about how to make this sustainable. Some thoughts of me:

1. RedHat does this business model well but it means not having packages for the open source version. Otherwise people will just start a mirror. We want to have great packages for the open source version.

2. We offer this with GitHost.io but it is not very profitable.

3. We try to make sure all management is automated for all our versions.

4. We still offer paying for features at https://about.gitlab.com/development/ There is little interest since if you wait the feature will likely be made at some point anyway. A bit of a bystander effect I think. Also, it is a lot of work to give correct quotes and many didn't get an order because of purchasing processes. Many companies have preferred vendors for software development.

We want the open source version to be easy to use and easy to maintain. So it is not possible for us to charge for that.

Well, we can call CentOS an opensource packaged version of RHEL (binaries not only SRPMS) by Red Hat. CentOS is now (two years iirc) a Red Hat project

I love GitLab, and I hope that some day there will be only one version. as Red Hat saw the light supporting CentOS, maybe GitLab could be able someday to see that enterprises will still pay with only one version

I think RedHat lost the server market to Ubuntu by not offering an open source package (server). We want GitLab users to have a great install and upgrade experience with the open source version. The tradeoff is that the open source version won't contain all the features. For more background please see about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

I never liked that gitlab made gitlab.com hosted private repos free. That is a perfectly good revenue stream for them, to provide private repo hosting, that they gave up on to crush the ability for their product to ever be viable in open source communities.

None of these communities have the time or resources to reinvent all the missing bits of EE in CE.

Probably the best answer though is feature incentives. Users (both individual and business) offer money for features to be added (and this can also apply to bug fixes). This is by far the largest untapped market for free software development out there today, and it honestly might be cultural more than anything why this isn't a more popular approach to monetization.

In the first year of GitLab as a company we tried to monetize the SaaS but if didn't work.

BTW we sponsored feature incentives two times (one for Huboard integration) and it didn't work in either case

GitLab CE contains everything to run a large forge including LDAP support for logging in (LDAP group sync is EE only).

We're very interested in having software communities switch to GitLab. If you are part of such an organization and there are features that are missing please email me at sid@ company domain.

A while ago the VLC people mentioned on HN that they wanted the branded homepage and we decided to open source it the same day.

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