Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.
And a race to bottom is creating an open source product “GitLab”, funding it with donations, creating a separate company “GitLab.com” which makes money by supporting GitLab, and at some point creating an entirely new product that isn’t open source but making that GitLab while letting the original open source version basically languish into something that is not useful at all.
I’m constantly surprised by why they don’t get more flak. I understand the developers are very active in the HN community and that is appreciated, but GitLab has been among the worse companies in how they’ve treated their open source, and now paying, users.
This blog post highlights some of those features that were added to Free last year including Service Desk, Feature Flags, Code Quality, and more: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor...
Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.