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GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

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Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#101

Post by jbergstroem »

brianwawok wrote: post #93
luka-birsa wrote: post #88

I've been a user of gitlab for 4yrs+. Its a great tool and a nice alternative to github for all us crazy "i want to have code on-prem" folks. That being said gitlab ce and its relationship to ee is more and more complicated. What started out at missing select features is now full out armaggedon of lacking features. See latest releases and youll see that all the cool stuff is comming out only to ee. Whats even worse,…

We went Gitlab to Bitbucket + Jira. Quite a bit more power, for less money (even after paying for cloud testers).

I think the Atlassian stack "wins" in the ~200-500 users range for enterprise companies but price doubles if you want the "cloud edition" (read: run on more than one vm). I asked for a few quotes of the gitlab EEU (ultimate) edition and found prices competitive.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#102

Post by geofft »

da_chicken wrote: post #76
geofft wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Open source" is an incredibly ambiguous term. Some people use it to mean the literal "the source is open to the world." Some people use it to mean the Open Source Definition from the Open Source Initiative https://opensource.org/osd , which is a very small set of modifications of the Debian Free Software Guidelines https://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines to make them not talk about Debian or use the term "…

> Personally, I think using "open source" to mean "the source is open to the public" is as misguided as using "free software" to mean "the software is free of charge," but in practice there's a lot more ambiguity in the former, not the latter. I would disagree. Both the terms "open source" and "free software" existed prior to the open-source software movement. Either way, you don't get to co-opt the plain English mea…

I think that's true of "free software," but I'm not sure it's true of "open source" - the primary meaning before the FOSS movements was open source intelligence (OSINT), i.e., intelligence collected from open sources. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-source_intelligence I'd believe that a phrase like "open source code" or something (parsed as "open source-code," not "open-source code") existed in the way "free software" did.

(Also, the fact that "intelligence" has a jargon meaning other than "smartness" is a good example that that is in fact how language works.)

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#104

Post by geofft »

jordigh wrote: post #39

"Open core" is just plain ol' proprietary software. Mac OS X is "open core" in the very literal sense that kernel and core are synonyms. It's really no big innovation to be selling secret sauce on top of free software; Android is also "open core" as is Matlab. Nowadays literally almost all proprietary software has bits of weakly-licensed free software in it such as curl or React. I've never been very impressed by Git…

One important difference between macOS and GitLab is that there are people running GitLab's free-software edition (e.g.,. https://salsa.debian.net/ ), and I know of I think nobody who's running Darwin.

Android leans towards the GitLab side because there are meaningful third-party distributions of Android.

Matlab is an interesting case because there are extremely popular libraries using its open-core components - essentially the entire scientific Python ecosystem depends on them, so while e.g. Jupyter Notebook doesn't ship LAPACK or FFTW itself, a huge number of its users pip install scipy, and many install PyFFTW. And from where I sit, the scientific Python ecosystem appears to be eating Matlab's lunch.

I don't know if "open core" is the right term to distinguish these cases, but there is an interesting distinction - third parties meaningfully using the free subset, third parties not meaningfully using it, and third parties using a competitor product based on the free subset.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#106

Post by ktpsns »

amingilani wrote: post #77

There's honestly nothing new here. GitLab calls itself open core because only the Community Edition (CE) is open-source and the Enterprise Edition is source-available. Anyone, after five minutes of looking at GitLab.com, knows this. They aren't hiding it and it's already incredibly public. They've even publicly talk about their 100+ user-relevant rule for features that decides what CE doesn't get [1] I don't understa…

Furthermore, Gitlab has a brilliant documentation which makes very clear which features are available in which version of the program. This distinction goes even into the documentation of the (JSON) API.

What is advertised as open source is really open source, you can browse it yourself. Find it at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce -- btw, this is a ~3GB repository, afaik you won't be able to host such a large repository at github.com for free. With self-hosted gitlab, you can do this without any hazzle.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#107

Post by [deleted] »

bubblethink wrote: post #86
ttoinou wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we'd have to carry our own internal fork of Gitlab So you have the choice between buying Gitlab or coding yourself. You would prefer it to be free and without hassle, but lack to see everything has a cost.

That's not OP's main point. It's that even if they implement it (as in a clean room), there is no chance of it being merged upstream. Now, if the OP implements some entirely different feature not related to gitlab's pricing, it can be merged upstream in the CE. This is in contrast to conventional open source projects.

[deleted]

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#108

Post by watwut »

Maybe, when we want comfortable hosting with all cool features one would wish in one place for free, just maybe, it is impossible to have it forever. Because the company and investors will run out of money one day, because we are not paying enough to host our stuff.

Maybe google re-opens google code, but that wont be free open source either.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#109

Post by stealthmodeclan »

So it's not financially viable to run such companies without trick like these.

If our financial system does not allow for companies like Github/Gitlab who provided positive value to society at large to sustain then perhaps the finanical system is to blame.

About Github/Gitlab employees, I can provide them housing, food, and some soft benefits. Can they work for free so that Github/Gitlab become sustainable?

Why government can't bless those companies to survive forever?

The major problem in the world is that evil players like Microsoft have all money to do anything they want and positive contributor to society like Github can't earn money.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

#110

Post by benatkin »

Here's how you get the instructions to install the open source version of GitLab on Ubuntu:

- Google "install gitlab ubuntu"

- Click the first link

- Choose Ubuntu

- Notice that it says ee in the command and think, oh, that's enterprise edition, I want the open source edition: sudo EXTERNAL_URL="http://gitlab.example.com" apt-get install gitlab-ee

- Look around and finally find the link "CE or EE"

- Read "If you're interested in using GitLab, we recommend you download and install GitLab Enterprise Edition" and shake your head

- Scroll to the bottom

- Note that you fit into the category "If you only want to download open source software Community Edition is the best choice" and think, maybe I'm one of those "open source zealots" I've been hearing about

- Click "Install GitLab Community Edition"

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