4 ms·

Gitlab is great stuff, but as a business model for open source, I always considered open core as somewhat toxic. When your community is trying to add features i

by SEJeff 10y ago

Gitlab is great stuff, but as a business model for open source, I always considered open core as somewhat toxic. When your community is trying to add features in your commercial implementation, you're "competing with yourself", which in this context, is actually a bad thing. I saw it wreck havoc in the ZenOSS community years ago. David Neary does a most excellent post on why: https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-core/ https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-...

reitanqild 10y ago
Spent a lot of time with Zenoss and also found it sad. That said I thonk open core us possible and one of a few good business models that can work with open source. I hope and believe Gitlab can and will do much better as Gitlabs commercial offerings are way more reasonably priced IIRC. (Another brilliant example would be sandstorm who openly admit that all enterprise features are in there, explain where the one big if switch is, says it is not illegal but expect you to not do it if you can afford to pay for it. Again IIRC.)
sytse 10y ago
Yes, we recognize we have to walk a fine line. In https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship we detail our policy regarding this. It starts with "When someone contributes a feature to CE that is already in EE we have a hard decision to make. We hope that people focus on contributing features that are neither in CE nor EE. This way both edits benefit from a new feature and GitLab Inc. don't have to make a hard decision."
- eevilspock 10y ago
  Can you explain the "hard decision"? Is it that you have to choose between two implementations for the same or overlapping features, meaning someone's work gets thrown out? Or do you mean that you have to decide whether to reject the freely offered CE pull request because it undermines the value-add of EE?
  - sytse 10y ago
    Both are options and we will make that trade-off according to the criteria mentioned. So far all our decisions were easy (low quality contribution or code copied from EE) but someday we'll have to make a hard decision.
    - eevilspock 10y ago
      To me the second reason is a serious conflict of interest issue and severely undermines the open source community spirit of your open core. GitLab's Inc would no longer be benevolent dictator for life, just plain old dictator.
      - rickycook 10y ago
        well, overall it's better than gitlab is open source than not, and also better that they have money and dedicated developers than not. i wouldn't take away either of these things from the {product,project}
      - sytse 10y ago
        I meant that rejecting an MR is always an option. We will never do that only because it undermines the value-add of EE. As stated on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship we will consider multiple factors. I just updated these factors to make sure everything that comes to mind is listed there in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/8e22bb935da1bca44e220862e93c2da7aa72b606 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/8e22bb93...

by SEJeff 10y ago

reitanqild 10y ago

Spent a lot of time with Zenoss and also found it sad. That said I thonk open core us possible and one of a few good business models that can work with open source. I hope and believe Gitlab can and will do much better as Gitlabs commercial offerings are way more reasonably priced IIRC. (Another brilliant example would be sandstorm who openly admit that all enterprise features are in there, explain where the one big if switch is, says it is not illegal but expect you to not do it if you can afford to pay for it. Again IIRC.)

sytse 10y ago

Yes, we recognize we have to walk a fine line. In https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship we detail our policy regarding this. It starts with "When someone contributes a feature to CE that is already in EE we have a hard decision to make. We hope that people focus on contributing features that are neither in CE nor EE. This way both edits benefit from a new feature and GitLab Inc. don't have to make a hard decision."

eevilspock 10y ago
Can you explain the "hard decision"? Is it that you have to choose between two implementations for the same or overlapping features, meaning someone's work gets thrown out? Or do you mean that you have to decide whether to reject the freely offered CE pull request because it undermines the value-add of EE?
- sytse 10y ago
  Both are options and we will make that trade-off according to the criteria mentioned. So far all our decisions were easy (low quality contribution or code copied from EE) but someday we'll have to make a hard decision.
  - eevilspock 10y ago
    To me the second reason is a serious conflict of interest issue and severely undermines the open source community spirit of your open core. GitLab's Inc would no longer be benevolent dictator for life, just plain old dictator.
    - rickycook 10y ago
      well, overall it's better than gitlab is open source than not, and also better that they have money and dedicated developers than not. i wouldn't take away either of these things from the {product,project}
    - sytse 10y ago
      I meant that rejecting an MR is always an option. We will never do that only because it undermines the value-add of EE. As stated on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship we will consider multiple factors. I just updated these factors to make sure everything that comes to mind is listed there in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/8e22bb935da1bca44e220862e93c2da7aa72b606 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/8e22bb93...