
GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source - lunchbreak
https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/05/gitlab-ultimate-and-gold-free-for-education-and-open-source/
======
atonse
(I promise this will turn out favorable for gitlab)

When gitlab first came out, I found the amount of shameful copying of github
distasteful. I thought, man these guys have not done an ounce of anything
original, so what's the point in even encouraging this kind of slimyness?

But then Github stagnated, and stagnated some more. And gitlab went past the
initial copying and started innovating and adding more features.

And now with their CI/CD, and fully integrated pipeline, they seem to be way,
way ahead of Github, whereas Github seems to have focused more on handling the
infrastructure needed for their sheer level of scale.

In Github's case, I bet they felt their hands were tied because they had a
whole ecosystem around them (like all the CI/CD companies that tightly
integrate). Gitlab didn't have that issue, and was free to integrate to their
heart's content.

To be honest, the only reason I moved back to Github after trying Gitlab a
couple years ago was the performance. But again, Gitlab seems to be the little
engine that keeps chugging. They have a certain hunger about them to improve,
that they're constantly and relentlessly chipping away at the software's
flaws. And sytse is always active in all these threads armed with great
answers to pretty much every single criticism leveled at them.

So at least for now, they seem to be a lot more hungry than Github, so kudos
to them.

Once all this hubbub dies down, I may move all my repos to Gitlab, but mostly
for the CI/CD pipeline.

Github has totally earned their success, but they did seem to be stagnating
for a while there.

~~~
Shank
> But then Github stagnated, and stagnated some more. And gitlab went past the
> initial copying and started innovating and adding more features.

As an industry, we have a unhealthy obsession with change for change's sake.
If we aren't redesigning everything, adding new features, or moving cheese all
the time, we aren't innovating.

But this the opposite of how we should think. If the GitHub repos page, for
instance, just works, then we don't need to keep changing it. Zach Holman made
a point, way back in 2012, that they intentionally hide UI features to
preserve simplicity and trust in their design. [0]

The thing I get the most from Gitlab's UI is this overwhelming sense of desire
to add every feature, expose every option, and make it as utilitarian as
possible. In doing so, though, Gitlab trades off approachability. To some this
is a great thing, but to others, it's just on the edge of too much. If there's
anything I want Gitlab to copy from GitHub, it's the opinionated decision
making of what to show and when to show it.

Gitlab's CI/CD stuff is a great example of this contrast. GitHub left it to
Travis and other CI providers, which makes both GitHub and those providers
have time to excel at what they're good at. They made the trade off deciding
that they couldn't pull it off as well as others, so they delegated it and
moved on. Gitlab took the opposite approach and built it in. While it adds
value for some users, it can and (at least in my opinion) does over complicate
the core feature set they offer.

It's okay to have two products with different approaches, but I wouldn't say
that it's a lack of innovation on GitHub's part. I would say it's just a
different set of tradeoff balancing.

[0]: [https://speakerdeck.com/holman/git-and-github-
secrets?slide=...](https://speakerdeck.com/holman/git-and-github-
secrets?slide=15)

~~~
holman
> Zach Holman made a point, way back in 2012, that they intentionally hide UI
> features to preserve simplicity and trust in their design.

Ehhhhh not quite. The point of hiding UI like how I mentioned in that talk was
that those features in particular were for the 1% (or less). Basically, the
finicky power users. Rather than cluttering up the UI with every single toggle
and dropdown under the sun, we'd focus more on nailing the experience for the
80-90% of users that would see the screen.

I think that's quite a bit different from what's being discussed in this
thread. The last few years in particular GitLab's been adding a lot more
features across the whole spectrum of development (CI, packaging, monitoring,
and so on), whereas GitHub has been mostly content to refine the existing
platform. I don't even think it's really a question of simplicity (or at least
not to the extent of what I was trying to mention in my talk from six years
ago) — it's more of a matter of expanding into very large holes that the
version control industry hasn't really tackled very much before (take a look
at Bitbucket, or even some of the open source clones, which all kind of stick
in the version-control-only perspective).

> I would say it's just a different set of tradeoff balancing.

That I'd probably agree with, though. I think GitLab's thoughts on what's
helpful to a developer is much broader than GitHub's narrower definition. Each
are making their bets with that, so it's more a matter of how you view your
own problems and the future of these kinds of problems and all that. :)

~~~
rad_gruchalski
> Ehhhhh not quite. The point of hiding UI like how I mentioned in that talk
> was that those features in particular were for the 1% (or less). Basically,
> the finicky power users. Rather than cluttering up the UI with every single
> toggle and dropdown under the sun, we'd focus more on nailing the experience
> for the 80-90% of users that would see the screen.

Every time I go back to gitlab I’m lost in all those drop downs and buttons it
shows me. Just nodding to you statement.

------
aviau
One downside to this announcement is that this may become an excuse to stop
open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.

We (Debian) use Gitlab (salsa.debian.org) but we wouldn't switch to the free
Gold/Ultimate version because we don't want our infrastructure to run on
proprietary software.

It might be that the majority of free software projects accept to use the free
subscription and therefore lower the pressure to add new features to Gitlab
CE.

~~~
sytse
As implied in the OP we understand that some projects (like Debian) are not
comfortable running proprietary software. We'll continue to listen to their
wishes. And the increasing adoption of GitLab open source by open source
projects might lead to more contributions to the open source code base.

------
koolba
> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free
> for educational institutions and open source projects.

Okay that sounds good though I can't figure out what "Gold" is as their
pricing page only mentions "Core" / "Starter" / "Premium" / "Ultimate":
[https://about.gitlab.com/pricing](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing)

 _EDIT_ : Nevermind ... the metallic plans are for the hosted SaaS offering
which doesn't show up by default on the pricing page with JS disabled.

> Open source projects: any project that uses a standard open source licence
> and is non-commercial.

I get the idea that GitLab wants to offer something to FOSS projects but
restricting things to "Non-commerical" is both vague and limiting. Would
Spring qualify? It's open source but backed by a commercial entity. How about
Redis? Open source with multiple companies offering hosted variants. What
about MySQL? It _is_ GPL ... but you know Oracle...

Also unless GitLab is going by the Queen's English "licence" is spelled wrong
(should be an "s").

> Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. However, you
> can buy support for 95% off, at $4.95 per user per month. To purchase
> support, contact sales.

So support is usually $100/user/month? Are there any takers at that price or
is that the usual high ball so that you can offer a discount to the
procurement department?

~~~
manyoso
Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide
that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your
project and insist you move to paid hosting.

It's a scam.

~~~
lnrdgmz
They do define non-commercial.

> It should not have paid support or paid contributors.

~~~
schoen
This is odd to me because Certbot and Boulder, the projects I have the most
connection with for my job, both have paid contributors, in each case paid by
501(c)(3) non-profit organizations (EFF and ISRG)¹. Both are free software
projects with "standard open source licenses" and neither project ever charges
fees to any user, although Certbot displays messages soliciting optional
donations to the non-profits in question.

Is this really what the author of the definition intended?

¹ Also, three for-profit companies have "seconded" developers or documentation
writers to Certbot at various points and at least one other one was planning
to and then didn't go through with it.

... also, no project that takes advantage of this offer can participate in
GSOC because then it would have a paid developer?

~~~
sciurus
It could be what they intended. It's a good way to be sure they only provide
free services to projects that would never be paying customers. If an
organization can pay someone to work on an open-source project, they could
also pay Gitlab to provide services to that project.

~~~
schoen
That's a very good point. Maybe "noncommercial" here is in fact meant to
capture something like "lacking in financial resources" rather than literally
"noncommercial".

------
danieldk
I think it is great that they are offering is, but it's a shame that
students/lecturers/researchers cannot apply individually. GitHub and others
work around the administrative load by checking the e-mail address against
educational domains.

~~~
sytse
Interesting idea. Is there an authoritative list of educational domains?
Checking the last part of the domain name doesn't work in some countries like
at my old university [https://www.utwente.nl/](https://www.utwente.nl/)

Also, my university gave me an alumni email address that I can still use today
that has the same domain name.

~~~
eximius
Usually people just check if the domain is `.edu` since IIRC you need to be an
accredited institution to acquire one.

EDIT: _University /Colleges_ only. Per wikipedia: "Since 2001, new registrants
to the domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions
of higher education;..."

Many places that offer free tiers for 'education' only worry about that level
of education and locale, anyway. (Not saying they should limit it to that, but
many do.)

~~~
hk__2
A lot (most?) of schools outside of the US don’t have a .edu domain. At least
in France, I never saw a single school website ending in .edu.

~~~
detaro
Most.

edu-domains where for a while also given to non-US institutions, but this
stopped and has now been US-only for a long time.

------
samaysharma
"It has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about
#movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we've seen a 7x
increase in orders." That's quite an impact!

~~~
ivl
Sounds like quite an overreaction to the MS purchase of GitHub. Good for
GitLab, though, they certainly deserve the extra traffic.

~~~
mjw1007
I think it's likely that there are fair number of people who were already
thinking "I should probably move to GitLab one day", and have taken the recent
announcement as a reason to actually get round to it (rather than being
directly motivated by disgust for Microsoft or similar).

~~~
bovermyer
I fall into this camp. I'm not particularly bothered by Microsoft's
acquisition of GitHub, but I've been eyeing GitLab for awhile now.

This just gave me an excuse to pull the trigger.

------
marenkay
While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing...

Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github
alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?

Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure
for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we
instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git,
providing Git infrastructure for all those projects?

It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure
into the hands of __any __commercial entity.

~~~
aviau
I think that is is best to open pull requests to Gitlab instead.

You may object and say that it is a bit lame to re-implement something that is
already in the paid version. However, it is best than re-implementing
everything from scratch.

Also, I have heard that Gitlab is open to open-sourcing features when you show
interest to have it in the free version.

Take a look at this issue for example, which tracks Gnome's wishlist for
Gitlab: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/43566](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566).

The guys behind the Gitlab company move the community edition pretty fast too,
possibly faster than what we would achieve by duplicating efforts.

However, as I mentioned in another comment
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209)),
this may change because the new free Ultimate/Gold subscriptions could become
excuses to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.

~~~
sytse
We're always open to discussing open sourcing parts of GitLab. We will
continue to do so on a case by case basis.

------
shiado
To those using Gitlab to escape Microsoft. You might want to check where
Gitlab is hosted. I suggest you go the self-hosted route instead.

~~~
justadudeama
Using a service that is hosted on azure is a lot different then a product
owned by Microsoft.

~~~
iotku
To expand on this, Gitlab is currently hosted on Azure (Hello Microsoft) with
current (now expedited) plans on shifting over to the Google Cloud Platform.

[https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-
abando...](https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-
microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/)

------
akerro
Can I self host gitlab gold with my 20 opensource projects but with 2 non-
opensource because these are my experiments with stuff I dont want to show and
get indexed by search engines?

@sytse: congratulations on that move :)

~~~
herogreen
Do you know that gitlab.com already offers free private repos ? If you do,
what are the features from this gold version that you are currently missing
with the free version ?

~~~
goda90
I think it's a question of does signing up for gold for open source repos
exhaust his free repos from the base version?

~~~
Snappy
Definitely not. Presumably the gold subscription would be associated with a
group for your open source projects, and your personal private projects would
be completely separate (and free, just with Core functionality).

------
nyxtom
This is a non-useful comment so feel free downvote, but the product offerings
for GitLab sound ironically like Windows released product offerings.

~~~
sytse
I must admit I did think of Windows Ultimate when I came up with that name :)

------
herogreen
While I enjoy my free gitlab.com account, I would prefer to use a version of
Gitlab that is 100% open-source. This in order to not feel trapped the day
they are bought by a bigger actor. I hope they will allow such an option.

~~~
naikrovek
You may be interested in Gitea or Gogs, then. Open source GitHub-like things.
Gitea is a fork of Gogs and has more features. Written in Golang.

Worth a look, perhaps.

~~~
lucb1e
Installed Gitea on a potato yesterday, can confirm it works great. Gitlab
wants 2 cores and 4GB RAM at minimum, Gitea runs on my old Intel Atom based
laptop with negligible RAM usage.

Gitea had a lot more pull requests merged and issues opened than Gogs, so it
seems to me they're the more active of the two. (See for yourself: go to both
Github repositories, hit 'insights' and check the past month.) Gitea was
apparently forked because they wanted more community driven development rather
than by one person.

------
super_trooper
So is GitLab the new GitHub for opensource?

~~~
duiker101
Why is BitBucket not being kept in consideration with this move?

~~~
naikrovek
I was wondering the same. I thought Atlassian had better rapport among devs
than GitLab.

~~~
sjm-lbm
Does Atlassian have better rapport with the businessy set that often makes
purchasing decisions? Yes.

Better rapport with developers? Probably not.

(and, FWIW, we use Bitbucket/Jira and honestly I'm fine with them - their
updates just tend to be full of the annoying things a bad PHB would love and
light on the things developers care about)

~~~
SanDimasFootbal
No sales people pushing the products makes it a little harder for it to be a
push down from the businessy-set.

------
benatkin
Maybe they should change their Twitter bio. It leads with "GitLab is open
source software" but if they move many of the users of the Community Edition
to GitLab Ultimate, they will stop feeling the pain points of the Community
Edition and too many core features will be Enterprise-only, and the Community
Edition will fall into disuse.

------
zamalek
I like this. I just don't know if it's a smart idea. Some threads since the
announcement have complained about the performance of Gitlab (in varying ways,
from website to CI). Is providing free access to an overloaded system really
the best course? Will this negativity impact paying customers? This is the
right thing to do, but preparation might have been a good first step.

~~~
behringer
I've seen no comments of gitlabs recent performance. Performance today may be
very different from a year or two ago when all these opinions were formed.

------
spicytunacone
Awesome response. I signed up years ago because they do unlimited free private
repos, though I wondered how they could afford to give so much away for free.
While I can't find the exact statement now, I was affected somewhat by their
dedication to always offering unlimited free repositories, believing that such
access was along the lines of a "digital right". Obviously there's strategy to
all of this, but following them all this time it's nice to believe that
perhaps the top of the organization still believe in that goal too.

------
imr_
fantastic move. perfect timing and opportunity.

------
dudus
Time to capitalize on the senseless sudden hate for gitHub

~~~
solarkraft
Microsoft does have a terrible history regarding open source.

Github felt safe before, a neutral ground for Google, Microsoft, Apple,
Facebook, Netflix, Amazon all come together and share their love for code and
just code.

Not so much anymore. The hate is over-blown, but it does feel weird now. With
a knowledge of Microsoft products I can understand why many people would see a
bleak future ahead [0].

[0]: Relevant image going around the internet: [https://desu-
usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/152818...](https://desu-
usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/1528185357874.jpg)

~~~
ssijak
Why not just first wait for their actual moves before spreading panic. I don`t
love microsoft and use 0 of their software/hardware products but I don`t
believe they will ruin Github. It would ruin their reputation with developers
to a very large degree.

But if they do, it is so easy to switch, that I do not see the point in "all
hell broke loose" panic attacks before anything actually happened.

~~~
user5994461
The move is already done. The big companies can't host their projects on their
main competitor, they will start migrating soon enough.

~~~
briandear
What big companies? You would be surprised what big companies use. GitHub
Enterprise for example, is self hosted.

~~~
solarkraft
But this has a public effect.

------
nik736
Without sounding too negative, in its current state I wouldn't even want to
use GitLab for free. I applaud them for this move, but I simply don't
understand how a company that employs that many people and that redesigsn its
entire software the 3rd? 4th? time still has a complete usability mess at its
hands.

~~~
seertaak
> complete usability mess

Works fine for us at zenAud.io... anything in particular you find lacking?

I must admit though: their change to group-based issues annoys me because you
have to jump through a bunch of links to get to the milestones for a project.
But otherwise it's pretty similar to competitors... but hey, maybe we're not
real power users.

~~~
Karunamon
Most of the issues I have with Gitlab's UI are the result of many small,
seemingly insignificant and probably nitpicky-sounding choices that tend to
build on to one another. All of these are my humble opinion:

* Everything about browsing projects. Okay, so if you click on "Projects", you get taken to a list of "your projects". That's kind of annoying since I'd go to my personal page if I wanted a list of stuff I've touched (kinda like Github) but it's defensible as a choice. If you want something that isn't yours, it takes another click to "explore projects", which goes to a "trending" page that will either be blank or have very few things on it, and another click after that to get to the time-sorted list of everything based on last update, which is usually what I want.

* Groups appear to be second class citizens of sorts, rather than the top level organizers they really are. (I.e. groups are separate from projects, even though all projects live in a group or user space). Bitbucket did this better - when you log in, you see a list of groups first, and from there drill down into projects.

Basically, it kinda wants to be a hierarchy but offers too many ways to
circumvent it. Imagine if you were just browsing a file explorer and saw files
two levels below your pwd. It's disorienting.

* Top level project pages feel cluttered and noisy. Github does this better, without requiring a separate sidebar.

* Repo settings are buried under expand links. This did not make the page more usable, it made it so I had to guess where the setting I want is.

* Why are there two nearly identical pages for showing repository contents? (One at the top level of a project, which is any project's landing page, and another on its "repository" tab, which is the same view missing a few elements)

* Releases and their artifacts are buried behind "tags" (which they technically are in Git parlance, but still) or a very easy to overlook CI status badge on the last commit shown on the landing page. Releases can only be created with API calls or manually through the new tag page, rather than programmatically or as part of a CI job. (Yes, I know, the CI job could technically call the API. You get a cookie. Point is, it feels rather buried.)

* Build artifacts can only be downloaded in a zip bundle, rather than individually

* I haven't figured out how to turn off the "Do you want to enable Auto DevOps?" div showing in every single repo.

* Advertising for Google Cloud on the CI Kubernetes page is just plain tacky. I'm sure there's a way to turn this off, but _I shouldn 't have to in the paid Enterprise product_.

~~~
matejlatin
This is really useful feedback @Karunamon! I see Sarrah already addressed it
so I just wanted to add my bit: I also think that the approach we used for
designing settings pages isn't optimal and suggested improvements in a
discussion on a related issue:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/45219](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/45219)

After seeing your feedback (and confirming my assumption) I decided to open a
new issue to specifically address this and would love to get your feedback on
the proposed solution:

[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues/47405](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/47405)

Thanks again for taking the time to write such detailed feedback down. It's
really helpful to us. Cheers!

~~~
frakman1
I agree that the Settings page is a pain to use or find anything. I prefer
everything to be displayed in one page so I can do a quick Cnt+F and search
for the string I am looking for instead of tediously mousing over every button
to expand. See Jenkins->Manage Jenkins->Configure System

~~~
Karunamon
Oddly enough, I stumbled on the fact that Ctrl-F works fine on these pages.
All of the items below the expands are still visible to the search, and the
expand automatically pops open when your cursor jumps to the matching text.

------
Cypher
Can a professor give me a gold access?

