> 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.
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.
In your opinion, what is a valid reason for software to be non-open source? Sure, saying the software doesn't "deserve" to be open source might be a bit extreme, but I keep seeing the sentiment on HN that free and open source is the only allowable route and people who want to charge for their software are to be demonized. I'm curious under what circumstances you think it is allowable for a company to profit off of software their engineers were paid to write?
There seems to be a lot of confusion around free software and open source. You can sell open source software (as a matter of fact, you can sell free software too). First of all, open source only means that source is available - the license is up to the developer though and it might as well be paid for commercial use etc. "Free" has two meanings - "free of charge" and "free as in freedom". I'm not arguing for "free of charge" - while it's nice to have software that you don't have to pay for, I could imagine, say, buying Microsoft Windows if I had access to the source code and could hack it as I go.
"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.
Look at what the free version offers. They are extremely generous with what they are putting in it, and it's super high quality. I'm very happy with it and I think they are doing everything right. Their platform is a joy to use.
I disagree, but it could be that we're using Gitlab differently. I used to be very enthusiastic at first, but over time I got annoyed by its quirks and decreasing amount of attention to CE. Could you tell more about how you use Gitlab? For example, is it self hosted?
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.