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 the

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.