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But suppose they do open source EE. How do they make money then? They can't pay employees with "thanks" from the community. Donations don't cut it. Consultancy

But suppose they do open source EE. How do they make money then? They can't pay employees with "thanks" from the community. Donations don't cut it. Consultancy doesn't scale; see the other discussion thread. GitLab would go under or would have to be forced to scale back development significantly. I don't think anybody really benefits from that long-term. Large free software communities have a choice of course. They can use an alternative (but which one? they are all inferior to GitLab as far as I can see), or they can fork GitLab CE and add the features they need themselves. But let's not kid ourselves that open sourcing GitLab EE is good for the community in the long term.

Spivak 10y ago
They could still sell EE even if it's open source. * Put up a few apt/yum repositories with the EE omnibus packages and charge for access and support. * Offer private off-prem SaSS. * Offer on-prem managed hosting for a premium. * For a hefty premium let companies sponsor features. (i.e Company A needs feature X so they pay you to add it to EE). The literal software isn't the thing you sell, you sell the ease of use and maintenance.
- zanny 10y ago
  Especially if they licensed EE under AGPL, very few companies would touch it to host private repos.
- corysama 10y ago
  1 won't last. Some random dev out there will manually replicate it for free as a side project. 2 & 3 will pay for some ops people who will have no time for anything but ops work. 4 will pay for 4 devs working on features tops. It suffers from the tragedy of the commons that all sponsor-ware does. Company A will only pay GitLab if they are too desperate to wait for someone else to do it and they think it will be a huge discount compared to doing it themselves and keeping it internal.
- sytse 10y ago
  Thanks for the thinking about how to make this sustainable. Some thoughts of me: 1. RedHat does this business model well but it means not having packages for the open source version. Otherwise people will just start a mirror. We want to have great packages for the open source version. 2. We offer this with GitHost.io but it is not very profitable. 3. We try to make sure all management is automated for all our versions. 4. We still offer paying for features at https://about.gitlab.com/development/ https://about.gitlab.com/development/ There is little interest since if you wait the feature will likely be made at some point anyway. A bit of a bystander effect I think. Also, it is a lot of work to give correct quotes and many didn't get an order because of purchasing processes. Many companies have preferred vendors for software development. We want the open source version to be easy to use and easy to maintain. So it is not possible for us to charge for that.
  - robmv 10y ago
    Well, we can call CentOS an opensource packaged version of RHEL (binaries not only SRPMS) by Red Hat. CentOS is now (two years iirc) a Red Hat project I love GitLab, and I hope that some day there will be only one version. as Red Hat saw the light supporting CentOS, maybe GitLab could be able someday to see that enterprises will still pay with only one version
    - sytse 10y ago
      I think RedHat lost the server market to Ubuntu by not offering an open source package (server). We want GitLab users to have a great install and upgrade experience with the open source version. The tradeoff is that the open source version won't contain all the features. For more background please see about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship
zanny 10y ago
I never liked that gitlab made gitlab.com hosted private repos free. That is a perfectly good revenue stream for them, to provide private repo hosting, that they gave up on to crush the ability for their product to ever be viable in open source communities. None of these communities have the time or resources to reinvent all the missing bits of EE in CE. Probably the best answer though is feature incentives. Users (both individual and business) offer money for features to be added (and this can also apply to bug fixes). This is by far the largest untapped market for free software development out there today, and it honestly might be cultural more than anything why this isn't a more popular approach to monetization.
- sytse 10y ago
  In the first year of GitLab as a company we tried to monetize the SaaS but if didn't work. BTW we sponsored feature incentives two times (one for Huboard integration) and it didn't work in either case

Spivak 10y ago

They could still sell EE even if it's open source. * Put up a few apt/yum repositories with the EE omnibus packages and charge for access and support. * Offer private off-prem SaSS. * Offer on-prem managed hosting for a premium. * For a hefty premium let companies sponsor features. (i.e Company A needs feature X so they pay you to add it to EE). The literal software isn't the thing you sell, you sell the ease of use and maintenance.

zanny 10y ago
Especially if they licensed EE under AGPL, very few companies would touch it to host private repos.
corysama 10y ago
1 won't last. Some random dev out there will manually replicate it for free as a side project. 2 & 3 will pay for some ops people who will have no time for anything but ops work. 4 will pay for 4 devs working on features tops. It suffers from the tragedy of the commons that all sponsor-ware does. Company A will only pay GitLab if they are too desperate to wait for someone else to do it and they think it will be a huge discount compared to doing it themselves and keeping it internal.
sytse 10y ago
Thanks for the thinking about how to make this sustainable. Some thoughts of me: 1. RedHat does this business model well but it means not having packages for the open source version. Otherwise people will just start a mirror. We want to have great packages for the open source version. 2. We offer this with GitHost.io but it is not very profitable. 3. We try to make sure all management is automated for all our versions. 4. We still offer paying for features at https://about.gitlab.com/development/ https://about.gitlab.com/development/ There is little interest since if you wait the feature will likely be made at some point anyway. A bit of a bystander effect I think. Also, it is a lot of work to give correct quotes and many didn't get an order because of purchasing processes. Many companies have preferred vendors for software development. We want the open source version to be easy to use and easy to maintain. So it is not possible for us to charge for that.
- robmv 10y ago
  Well, we can call CentOS an opensource packaged version of RHEL (binaries not only SRPMS) by Red Hat. CentOS is now (two years iirc) a Red Hat project I love GitLab, and I hope that some day there will be only one version. as Red Hat saw the light supporting CentOS, maybe GitLab could be able someday to see that enterprises will still pay with only one version
  - sytse 10y ago
    I think RedHat lost the server market to Ubuntu by not offering an open source package (server). We want GitLab users to have a great install and upgrade experience with the open source version. The tradeoff is that the open source version won't contain all the features. For more background please see about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

zanny 10y ago

I never liked that gitlab made gitlab.com hosted private repos free. That is a perfectly good revenue stream for them, to provide private repo hosting, that they gave up on to crush the ability for their product to ever be viable in open source communities. None of these communities have the time or resources to reinvent all the missing bits of EE in CE. Probably the best answer though is feature incentives. Users (both individual and business) offer money for features to be added (and this can also apply to bug fixes). This is by far the largest untapped market for free software development out there today, and it honestly might be cultural more than anything why this isn't a more popular approach to monetization.

sytse 10y ago
In the first year of GitLab as a company we tried to monetize the SaaS but if didn't work. BTW we sponsored feature incentives two times (one for Huboard integration) and it didn't work in either case