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> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects. Okay that sounds good thou

by koolba 8y ago

> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects. Okay that sounds good though I can't figure out what "Gold" is as their pricing page only mentions "Core" / "Starter" / "Premium" / "Ultimate": https://about.gitlab.com/pricing https://about.gitlab.com/pricing EDIT: Nevermind ... the metallic plans are for the hosted SaaS offering which doesn't show up by default on the pricing page with JS disabled. > Open source projects: any project that uses a standard open source licence and is non-commercial. I get the idea that GitLab wants to offer something to FOSS projects but restricting things to "Non-commerical" is both vague and limiting. Would Spring qualify? It's open source but backed by a commercial entity. How about Redis? Open source with multiple companies offering hosted variants. What about MySQL? It is GPL ... but you know Oracle... Also unless GitLab is going by the Queen's English "licence" is spelled wrong (should be an "s"). > Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. However, you can buy support for 95% off, at $4.95 per user per month. To purchase support, contact sales. So support is usually $100/user/month? Are there any takers at that price or is that the usual high ball so that you can offer a discount to the procurement department?

francislavoie 8y ago
Gold is here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com They have pricing for self-hosted, and pricing for gitlab.com (managed)
manyoso 8y ago
Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your project and insist you move to paid hosting. It's a scam.
- lnrdgmz 8y ago
  They do define non-commercial. > It should not have paid support or paid contributors.
  - manyoso 8y ago
    Can I host a copy of the Linux kernel on ultimate/gold? If not, then any person can make a fork of an OSS project and charge 1 cent and it is now a "commercial" project and can no longer be hosted on ultimate/gold. It is not defined and Gitlab can use this ambiguity to at any moment start seeking rent...
    - schoen 8y ago
      Or, someone could just hire a contractor to start contributing to the project, and now it has paid contributors. :-)
  - schoen 8y ago
    This is odd to me because Certbot and Boulder, the projects I have the most connection with for my job, both have paid contributors, in each case paid by 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (EFF and ISRG)¹. Both are free software projects with "standard open source licenses" and neither project ever charges fees to any user, although Certbot displays messages soliciting optional donations to the non-profits in question. Is this really what the author of the definition intended? ¹ Also, three for-profit companies have "seconded" developers or documentation writers to Certbot at various points and at least one other one was planning to and then didn't go through with it. ... also, no project that takes advantage of this offer can participate in GSOC because then it would have a paid developer?
    - sciurus 8y ago
      It could be what they intended. It's a good way to be sure they only provide free services to projects that would never be paying customers. If an organization can pay someone to work on an open-source project, they could also pay Gitlab to provide services to that project.
      - schoen 8y ago
        That's a very good point. Maybe "noncommercial" here is in fact meant to capture something like "lacking in financial resources" rather than literally "noncommercial".
- Shank 8y ago
  > It's a scam. This is typical education & OSS licensing. You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system. JetBrains products start with "for educational use only" when using academic discounts. When using Autodesk software for free, you get the same stuff. Gitlab is trying really hard to be a great offering -- it's highly improbable they're going to resort to extortion on their newly opened discount programs.
  - irrational 8y ago
    How is it a scam? When I was a college student I would have loved free use of the JetBrains IDEs. When I graduated and got a job I may have needed to use a different IDE (and JetBrains would obviously like me to encourage my new company to switch to JetBrains), but I don't think that is a scam.
  - Dayshine 8y ago
    >You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system Which is a shame, because it excludes non-commercial research. I work on an academic public health research programme and I'm pretty sure we're not eligible for this wording. We don't teach, we research, we're academics not lecturers...
    - Tijdreiziger 8y ago
      You could always try e-mailing them. It might just be a use case they haven't thought about.

by koolba 8y ago

francislavoie 8y ago

Gold is here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com They have pricing for self-hosted, and pricing for gitlab.com (managed)

manyoso 8y ago

Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your project and insist you move to paid hosting. It's a scam.

lnrdgmz 8y ago
They do define non-commercial. > It should not have paid support or paid contributors.
- manyoso 8y ago
  Can I host a copy of the Linux kernel on ultimate/gold? If not, then any person can make a fork of an OSS project and charge 1 cent and it is now a "commercial" project and can no longer be hosted on ultimate/gold. It is not defined and Gitlab can use this ambiguity to at any moment start seeking rent...
  - schoen 8y ago
    Or, someone could just hire a contractor to start contributing to the project, and now it has paid contributors. :-)
- schoen 8y ago
  This is odd to me because Certbot and Boulder, the projects I have the most connection with for my job, both have paid contributors, in each case paid by 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (EFF and ISRG)¹. Both are free software projects with "standard open source licenses" and neither project ever charges fees to any user, although Certbot displays messages soliciting optional donations to the non-profits in question. Is this really what the author of the definition intended? ¹ Also, three for-profit companies have "seconded" developers or documentation writers to Certbot at various points and at least one other one was planning to and then didn't go through with it. ... also, no project that takes advantage of this offer can participate in GSOC because then it would have a paid developer?
  - sciurus 8y ago
    It could be what they intended. It's a good way to be sure they only provide free services to projects that would never be paying customers. If an organization can pay someone to work on an open-source project, they could also pay Gitlab to provide services to that project.
    - schoen 8y ago
      That's a very good point. Maybe "noncommercial" here is in fact meant to capture something like "lacking in financial resources" rather than literally "noncommercial".
Shank 8y ago
> It's a scam. This is typical education & OSS licensing. You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system. JetBrains products start with "for educational use only" when using academic discounts. When using Autodesk software for free, you get the same stuff. Gitlab is trying really hard to be a great offering -- it's highly improbable they're going to resort to extortion on their newly opened discount programs.
- irrational 8y ago
  How is it a scam? When I was a college student I would have loved free use of the JetBrains IDEs. When I graduated and got a job I may have needed to use a different IDE (and JetBrains would obviously like me to encourage my new company to switch to JetBrains), but I don't think that is a scam.
- Dayshine 8y ago
  >You can find the same verbiage in basically every discounted system Which is a shame, because it excludes non-commercial research. I work on an academic public health research programme and I'm pretty sure we're not eligible for this wording. We don't teach, we research, we're academics not lecturers...
  - Tijdreiziger 8y ago
    You could always try e-mailing them. It might just be a use case they haven't thought about.