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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

> Well, it's not like all of Gitlab is fully open source.

I think this is not a fair assessment, GitLabs community edition is fully open source and is a full product. The fact you can add proprietary elements for a licensing fee (which are also "open" in that they are readable, debuggable, etc;) is not at all the same as hosting on a platform which is entirely proprietary.

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GitLab Community Edition is being used by major FOSS communities like Debian [1], GNOME [2] and Freedesktop [3].

[1]: https://salsa.debian.org/help [2]: https://gitlab.gnome.org/help [3]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/help

While gitlab.com is based on the Enterprise Edition version, it's 100% possible to host into FOSS only if you wish.

I say this as somebody who has used all three of those instances -- it is an inconvenience to create an account for each project you send patches to (or even just file a bug).

Doesn’t oauth help here?

1. Who is the OAuth provider?

2. What does the registration process look like?

OAuth helps with federated authentication. It's not federated registration.

1. Whoever you want, as long as the remote service supports them, github is common. So is the official gitlab.com

2. Click “sign in with provider” log in as normal, or just get logged in if you have a cookie.

3. These are functionally identical, it’s 2 clicks to create an account on gitlab if you use an external identity provider.

I feel the same. If Gitlab released the community edition as MIT license (not sure what the license is offhand) with no proprietary version, there's nothing stopping some 3rd party from creating proprietary versions/extensions of their own product.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce

I’m pretty sure it’s MIT. This page says it is.

Yes. BSD-derived licenses do not stop someone from distributing a proprietary version, while the GPL does (although you can still charge for your version even with the GPL, you just have to distribute your source with the package and make it available under the GPL).

You are also not being fair to github then - you can run Github Enterprise Server and it is also "open" in that it's readable (non-obfuscated), debuggable, etc... It's basically a snapshot of what they run at github.com with added features for enterprise (like AD integration). You can't distribute the code.

How easy it is to actually do that depends on your ruby skills and your wallet.

I don't think that people are drawn to the specific github implementation (code), it's that they're drawn to github.com the domain where you can't do what you propose.

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