I'm telling the author that there's virtually no threat of anyone forking gitlab-ce, for any reason whatsoever. Even though "anyone has the right," as you say,

I'm telling the author that there's virtually no threat of anyone forking gitlab-ce, for any reason whatsoever. Even though "anyone has the right," as you say, and even though the lack of spam filtering there makes gitlab-ce essentially useless as a public-facing repo service. Author claimed that open sourcing would equal less money for author. My argument is that is not a given nor even likely-- it depends on specifics wrt complexity of the software, difficulty of maintaining it, relationship of dev to users, etc.