This is not true, they publish the code at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab. If you want to use premium features, you

This is not true, they publish the code at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab. If you want to use premium features, you do have to pay to unlock them, and depending on your deployment you would need to get the gitlab-ee image instead of the gitlab-ce one.