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The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outd

The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model. Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ? Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the reasonable expectations or pay for enterprise edition coming with a big bag of features I have no use for just to get the missing features that I can have on github for free (And I'm not a big fan of github)? As such gitlab community is not very useful to me and does not seem to have a future because its chosen business model goes against its usefulness to people.

levlaz 11y ago
I think called the community edition crippled is a stretch. I have a small team (4-5 devs) that has been using the CE for a few years now and we have been more than happy with it for all of our needs. The EE edition features make a lot of sense for much larger organizations I suppose.
- sytse 11y ago
  Glad to hear that in your case we made the CE/EE feature tradeoff correctly!
DouweM 11y ago
GitLab CE is not crippled in any way, it is used every single day by hundreds of thousands of companies and millions upon millions of developers. It is and has always been our (GitLab, the company) main focus, we only decide to make new features EE-only when we think that they are mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees. Besides the company's efforts, contributions from the 1000+ community contributors always go into CE, unless the contributor submits it to the EE repository specifically. As evidence, just look at our Direction page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, or compare the CE and EE changelogs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO... vs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELOG-EE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELO.... Note that our free, hosted GitLab.com runs EE, which means that EE features like GitLab Pages ("Hosting static pages straight from GitLab") are available to everyone.
- drewcrawford 11y ago
  Just yesterday I ended up implementing my own mirroring of GitHub repositories. GitLab supports this in EE (new in 8.3), but not CE. That's not a feature that only large enterprises use–I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. To be clear, I don't think there is anything sinister about keeping features behind a paid firewall. That is how software developers have paid their rent for decades. I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. I've debated about buying EE to fill in the gaps, but you sell licenses in packs of 10, and I only need 2 :-)
  - DouweM 11y ago
    > I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? > I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. Fair enough, I'm not saying our judgment of what is and what isn't interesting to smaller/single-person teams is perfect. If the general feedback of the community is that a certain piece of functionality belongs in CE rather than EE, we will consider bringing it to CE. We have done this in the past.
    - drewcrawford 11y ago
      > Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? 1. My hosting is way more reliable than yours :-) 2. I need to host the CI runners myself anyway, because you don't have the right config 3. I already have a private GitLab install, so it's no extra trouble 4. My repository mirroring is quite a lot better than yours, as it's instant, not hourly 5. I prefer to have a commercial relationship with important tools. You seem like nice people, let's see what happens when you get acquired. As long as you can't be bothered to sell to 2-person teams, I'll just run CE and have my commercial relationship with AWS instead.
orf 11y ago
There is nothing crippled about GitLab CE. There are a few features that are clearly useful to large enterprise users, and if you're using GitLab with 50+ employees I'm sure $39 per year year per seat isn't going to break the bank. We've been using GitLab CE for a while internally and it's fantastic. Don't dismiss it because of some narrow-minded ideology.
Rafert 11y ago
git-annex is EE-only, but they're giving you git-lfs for free in CE. I expect the latter getting way more traction due to GitHub's backing. Working with a on-premise GitLab CE has been just fine in a company with 20 developers, using Jenkins and later Go[1] for CI. [1]: https://www.go.cd/ https://www.go.cd/
- sytse 11y ago
  We think that Git LFS has more traction too. Any reason why you're using Go instead of GitLab CI?

levlaz 11y ago

I think called the community edition crippled is a stretch. I have a small team (4-5 devs) that has been using the CE for a few years now and we have been more than happy with it for all of our needs. The EE edition features make a lot of sense for much larger organizations I suppose.

sytse 11y ago
Glad to hear that in your case we made the CE/EE feature tradeoff correctly!

DouweM 11y ago

GitLab CE is not crippled in any way, it is used every single day by hundreds of thousands of companies and millions upon millions of developers. It is and has always been our (GitLab, the company) main focus, we only decide to make new features EE-only when we think that they are mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees. Besides the company's efforts, contributions from the 1000+ community contributors always go into CE, unless the contributor submits it to the EE repository specifically. As evidence, just look at our Direction page: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/, or compare the CE and EE changelogs: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO... vs https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELOG-EE https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/CHANGELO.... Note that our free, hosted GitLab.com runs EE, which means that EE features like GitLab Pages ("Hosting static pages straight from GitLab") are available to everyone.

drewcrawford 11y ago
Just yesterday I ended up implementing my own mirroring of GitHub repositories. GitLab supports this in EE (new in 8.3), but not CE. That's not a feature that only large enterprises use–I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. To be clear, I don't think there is anything sinister about keeping features behind a paid firewall. That is how software developers have paid their rent for decades. I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. I've debated about buying EE to fill in the gaps, but you sell licenses in packs of 10, and I only need 2 :-)
- DouweM 11y ago
  > I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? > I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. Fair enough, I'm not saying our judgment of what is and what isn't interesting to smaller/single-person teams is perfect. If the general feedback of the community is that a certain piece of functionality belongs in CE rather than EE, we will consider bringing it to CE. We have done this in the past.
  - drewcrawford 11y ago
    > Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? 1. My hosting is way more reliable than yours :-) 2. I need to host the CI runners myself anyway, because you don't have the right config 3. I already have a private GitLab install, so it's no extra trouble 4. My repository mirroring is quite a lot better than yours, as it's instant, not hourly 5. I prefer to have a commercial relationship with important tools. You seem like nice people, let's see what happens when you get acquired. As long as you can't be bothered to sell to 2-person teams, I'll just run CE and have my commercial relationship with AWS instead.

orf 11y ago

There is nothing crippled about GitLab CE. There are a few features that are clearly useful to large enterprise users, and if you're using GitLab with 50+ employees I'm sure $39 per year year per seat isn't going to break the bank. We've been using GitLab CE for a while internally and it's fantastic. Don't dismiss it because of some narrow-minded ideology.

Rafert 11y ago

git-annex is EE-only, but they're giving you git-lfs for free in CE. I expect the latter getting way more traction due to GitHub's backing. Working with a on-premise GitLab CE has been just fine in a company with 20 developers, using Jenkins and later Go[1] for CI. [1]: https://www.go.cd/ https://www.go.cd/

sytse 11y ago
We think that Git LFS has more traction too. Any reason why you're using Go instead of GitLab CI?