Topic on Talk:Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/GitLab

I'm a bit weary of using open core products after what we had with varnish (another open core product we have in production that's being phased out in favor of a fully open source one). Varnish worked well in scale but it was intentionally lacking important features (like TLS support) to encourage users to buy the full version. This is the open core business model and I'm afraid we are going to end up with a similar situation with gitlab. Even if it looks like we have everything we need for our usecase, there's no guarantee it'll be still accessible tomorrow (I'd rather we don't fork gitlab). Has this been taken into account?

This is one of the things I was (am) worried about. For the time being, GitLab has been moving in the opposite direction; that is, moving features from the enterprise edition (EE) to the community edition (CE) with some regularity (https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-core/).

The behavior of moving nice feature from EE to CE could change, of course, if the company decides without much notice to pivot -- company behavior is sometimes capricious, unfortunately.

I talked, briefly, with folks from KDE, Gnome, freedesktop.org, and Debian: there does seem to be a community of like-minded organizations that are working on and with GitLab and GitLab, Inc, respectively. The impression I have is that there is enough of a a critical mass of open projects that run the community edition to keep the community edition in a functional state.

For more, see https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/, notably:

• "We won't remove features from the open source codebase in order to make the same feature paid (features might be removed from the open source codebase due to changes in the application)"
• "The open source codebase will have all the features that are essential to running a large 'forge' with public and private repositories"
• "The open source codebase will not contain any artificial limits (repositories, users, size, performance, etc.)"

There's more there and it's worth a read.

I also want to re-emphasize the community of like-minded orgs using GitLab right now in the same way (self-hosted Community Edition); there is already positive examples of cross collaboration and support.

Thank you for responses. I feel it answers my concerns. Specially joining the group of open-source orgs using gitlab would increase the CE version bargaining power.

Possibly late to the party, but GitLab also have their open source deal, where Wikimedia can get much of the premium EE feature set for free. Requirements are non-profit org, and all the hosted code is public and open source licensed: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/