Hacker News Reader

Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Sincere question: what's the point of GitLab or Mattermost being open source when they clearly want to control/restrict/monopolize use of their applications?

IIRC GitLab is "open core" which just means it's not fully open source and Mattermost is not really fully open source either, it its own confusing way.

The purpose of open source was to give users full and unrestricted power. To free them from lock in and allow them to be the masters of the software they use.

It seems that these companies view open source as a marketing trick and perhaps a way to save on development costs. They're making a mockery of open source and should probably be shunned for it.

View on HN

I think it is a pretty fair as they have people working full time in their products since their conception. I'd rather companies providing their source and strugling to monetize their product than companies selling just closed source alternatives.

Restrictions could be provided by people through OSS, these companies don't prevent these alternatives from existing. The lack of interest does. The same could be said about many OSS that strugle to receive donations.

I could agree that a world where only OSS without monetization exists, where people donate and keep people investing their time on improving OSS without needing restrictions. The reality is that without these restrictions, people are not willing to pay.

> what's the point of GitLab or Mattermost being open source when they clearly want to control/restrict/monopolize use of their applications?

- We can fork it if we really don't like that direction, but think what's there is valuable.

- We can propose Merge Requests (as they are on GitLab) that might be higher priority for us personally than for the company, which might accept them just not have the resources to work on them itself as quickly as we'd like.

> Mattermost is not really fully open source either, it its own confusing way.

Honestly curious: In which way is Mattermost not Open Source? As far as I can tell the code is under AGPL, which may not be the most popular FOSS license, but is generally accepted as being one.

> IIRC GitLab is "open core" which just means it's not fully open source

Gitlab CE is fully open source. Gitlab EE is proprietary. The same company produces both, but you can decide to use only the former, and remain fully in control.

This is certainly not the vision of the future that supporters of a fully-FOSS world like me wish to see, but seems strictly better than most proprietary companies, which still use FOSS code/libraries while contributing little or nothing.

GitLab & its CEO call it 'open core':

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17225725 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/20/gitlab-is-open-core-gith...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12128546 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/14/building-an-open-source-...

I'm not denying that - what I described is what 'open core' means.

From your link: "We ship GitLab CE which is open source and GitLab EE that is closed source."

Exactly what I wrote!

I wasn't disagreeing with you, just explaining (though it seems you knew) why the other commenter recalled the phrase in relation to GitLab.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com