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Comment by manyoso | Hacker News Reader

Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your project and insist you move to paid hosting.

It's a scam.

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> It's a scam.

This is typical education & OSS licensing. You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system. JetBrains products start with "for educational use only" when using academic discounts. When using Autodesk software for free, you get the same stuff.

Gitlab is trying really hard to be a great offering -- it's highly improbable they're going to resort to extortion on their newly opened discount programs.

How is it a scam? When I was a college student I would have loved free use of the JetBrains IDEs. When I graduated and got a job I may have needed to use a different IDE (and JetBrains would obviously like me to encourage my new company to switch to JetBrains), but I don't think that is a scam.

>You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system

Which is a shame, because it excludes non-commercial research. I work on an academic public health research programme and I'm pretty sure we're not eligible for this wording. We don't teach, we research, we're academics not lecturers...

You could always try e-mailing them. It might just be a use case they haven't thought about.

They do define non-commercial.

> It should not have paid support or paid contributors.

Can I host a copy of the Linux kernel on ultimate/gold?

If not, then any person can make a fork of an OSS project and charge 1 cent and it is now a "commercial" project and can no longer be hosted on ultimate/gold. It is not defined and Gitlab can use this ambiguity to at any moment start seeking rent...

Or, someone could just hire a contractor to start contributing to the project, and now it has paid contributors. :-)

This is odd to me because Certbot and Boulder, the projects I have the most connection with for my job, both have paid contributors, in each case paid by 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (EFF and ISRG)¹. Both are free software projects with "standard open source licenses" and neither project ever charges fees to any user, although Certbot displays messages soliciting optional donations to the non-profits in question.

Is this really what the author of the definition intended?

¹ Also, three for-profit companies have "seconded" developers or documentation writers to Certbot at various points and at least one other one was planning to and then didn't go through with it.

... also, no project that takes advantage of this offer can participate in GSOC because then it would have a paid developer?

It could be what they intended. It's a good way to be sure they only provide free services to projects that would never be paying customers. If an organization can pay someone to work on an open-source project, they could also pay Gitlab to provide services to that project.

That's a very good point. Maybe "noncommercial" here is in fact meant to capture something like "lacking in financial resources" rather than literally "noncommercial".

The definition was made by 1password and we reused that. We do want to extend this offer to Certbot and Boulder. You can reference this HN comment to make sure your application gets excepted. And because we owe a lot to Let's Encrypt we'll also trow in the support for free if you need it.

I don't know if these specific projects plan to switch to GitLab, but I appreciate your offer very much, and if the topic comes up I'll certainly pass it along.

I was just thinking of this situation as an example of an uncertainty in the current definition of "noncommercial", rather than a practical problem that we faced immediately.

But again, thanks for chiming in and thanks for the offer.

No paid contributors? So, projects like Vue would not qualify because Evan You gets paid through Patreon? What about open source contributors from companies like Facebook or Google? They get paid.

It's hard to imagine a single open source project that doesn't have some sort of commercial contribution or sponsorship!

edit, response to detaro:

FB and Google should definitely pay to host their own projects, but many of their engineers contribute to projects all across GitHub!

> What about open source projects from companies like Facebook or Google?

Why shouldn't Facebook or Google pay for code hosting if they want more than the free plan offers?

There is no limitation on resources / seats etc on the free plan. The plans are all feature based

That is a lot better than nothing, but they still need to fix that -- if I submit a patch as part of my job, the project now has paid contributers, even if they don't know it.

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