The whole idea of VideoLAN infrastructure migration from gitweb/trac/etc to gitlab and not to github was to use and promote free and open-source software.
Using closed-source software there is out of question, really.
This is really a problem I think. Maybe GitLab could reconsider to adopt a licensing model[1] for the Enterprise Edition that would make it more Free Software friendly?
[1] I.e. a licensing model based on GPL and selling services that Red Hat uses for RHEL, instead of a licensing model like they, and a minority of the "open source" companies, use.
When we introduced the Enterprise Edition we had it under MIT license. This caused much confusion with our customers. Maybe the situation is better now with companies like Hortonworks educating the market. But unlike others we want to make our open source edition as simple to install and maintain as the paid version.
My understanding from taking a Red Hat sysadmin course is that what you get from a RHEL subscription is firstly access to their repos from which to download updates and additional packages. The other, perhaps bigger, portion of a RHEL subscription is the support; I think they will answer the phone and provide you fixes for any bugs in RHEL-provided software relatively quickly. This is nice for companies, for whom uptime and stability are often superior to most other concerns, like staying close in feature parity to upstream.
Note that the accepted answer there is wrong, as it ignores the fact that the question asker wanted to distribute virtual machines containing the software, which is a violation of the GPL. The currently second answer by h22 is correct.
"This software and associated documentation files (the "Software") may only be
used if you (and any entity that you represent) have agreed to, and are in
compliance with, the GitLab Subscription Terms of Service, available at
https://about.gitlab.com/terms/#subscription (the “EE Terms”), and otherwise
have a valid GitLab Enterprise Edition subscription for the correct number of
user seats."
The whole idea of VideoLAN infrastructure migration from gitweb/trac/etc to gitlab and not to github was to use and promote free and open-source software.
Using closed-source software there is out of question, really.