> The other way to look at it is that this is pretty advanced stuff, and frankly, it doesn’t deserve to be, free, open source.
So is all the stuff that gitlab builds on, like git, or ruby, or linux, that's all pretty advanced stuff I'd say.
Did they actually say that...? I only went to the page to confirm this and it appears true. Sounds like next time I choose self-hosted Github alternative, I should exclude Gitlab from my options - based on their approach so far, it feels like they really do mean this kind of contemptuous attitude of "only basic stuff should be free software". I used to cheer for Gitlab, but this is just way over the line.
And despite what some say, I really don't think it's that great a product - they seem to be focused on getting a million of things poorly than get their core fixed. Performance is still terrible, see what happens to your browser when you view a diff for a large merge request. Also, you there's a limit to the number of commits in the history you can browse - come on, my `git log` loads the whole history in a split second but you can't render it? And they clearly don't care - I reported many issues to them that got confirmed and most of the time those were just shrugged off. As long as you're not an EE user, you won't really get much more than the annoyance of having odd version numbers make the sidebar sticky and even ones undo that.
"free as in freedom" means that I can not only access the code, but also redistribute it and use it in any way I see fit. This doesn't mean that the developers can't sell it though - they can sell support, extra features, hosting and so on. There are ways to profit from free/open source software. I could as well imagine Gitlab Foundation and Gitlab Ltd, where one provides the core and the other non-free modules that cover enterprise use cases. I don't like their current scheme though.
Just be honest and say you want to charge for advanced features, because there's little money to be made in open source and you're a business after all and want to pay your employees a living wage.
But they are being honest, they are saying what they are thinking....
One of the awesome aspects of being transparent by default: taking an internal conversation between three coworkers and making the recording and transcript public. I love being able to share our strategy publicly and talk about it openly.
While I can't change what I said, we can make the blog post more accurately reflect our beliefs as reflected on our Stewardship page[0]. There's no limit on what "deserves" to be open source. And, imho, GitLab has open sourced a ton of advanced functionality already.
But "GitLab Inc. is a for profit company that balances the need to improve GitLab Community Edition (CE) with the need to add features to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) exclusively in order to generate income."
Advancedness is not a criteria in open sourcing or not open sourcing. There are advanced features that are open source, such as Review Apps[0]. There are basic features that are proprietary, such as File Locking[1]. The criteria we use to decide which version the features go in are documented on our stewardship page[2].
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/ [1] https://about.gitlab.com/features/file-locking/ [2] https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/#what-features-are-ee-o...
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34591#note_56...