I would like to see that there is just one gitlab version, and that the enterprise features are simply available in the community edition too. I will not pay just for a feature like repo mirroring, but it's i think a feature many people will use and or utilise when moving, migrating to a gitlab setup.
But it is the one and only feature i am missing so not worth upgrading to EE for me.
As soon as an alternative (open source, self hosted, free) comes around that does have this built-in, i will be tempted to try it. (and of course on success i will move away from gitlab).
But for now, gitlab (CE) works best for me, self hosted.
If you think about what you're asking: youre asking for folks who build infrastructure you rely on to have no viable way of creating a self sustaining business model. Aka no virtuous circle. No development. This perspective is a classic tragedy of the commons situation and makes perfect sense for you to have as an individual. But it's sad.
There will always be users like me who know how to self host stuff and don't want 3rd parties having access to their repos. But there will always be plenty of people who like to outsource this, have it hosted by 3rd party etc etc. It's the service that is worth the money, not the features.
Features have a limited value, they are valuable until an alternative provides it for free (which is the common thing these days). And that will happen here too, just take times. Same as gitlab nibbled at github, something else will come around to take share from gitlab.
Simplifying the development to just one tree/version, saves a lot of maintenance, development discussions, allows feedbacks of all features by self hosting users as if they were enterprise hosted clients. This also has a value.
I wasn't refering to hosted vs not hosted. I was referring to the virtuous cycle of supporting people by giving them a viable business option who make software (whether FoSS and deployed on local infrastructure or hosted).
Do you believe Linus Torvalds deserves to have a salary? Are you happy he does? I sure am. Do you think that money grows on trees? It comes from people realizing that it's important to contribute to sustain the pieces they rely on. The majority are always free-loaders: I just think it's important to emphasize that if everyone were, the cycle of innovation would slow significantly.
We do our best to make CE and EE excellent, where the features that land in EE are mostly interesting for larger teams. For every feature that we don't bring to CE, this is always a hard decision.
I'd love to see an a la carte licensing option, where an organization could start with stock CE and license just the features they need. I realize that'd be a bear to implement, though.
I understand, and money has to be made too. It's a nasty trade off. Though as i wrote to the other reply, its the service that is worth the money not necessarily the feature(s).
IMHO, there is always a certain percentage of users that want to pay. The more users in total, the larger the amount of paying customers.
And the repo mirroring would be a great feature to let me move a lot of github project users to gitlab without losing any potential updates from an upstream source.
It would also allow for nice backup purposes, though you could do that now of course already with the hosted enterprise solution. But if the feature was in CE, many would be used, familiarised, to the feature, and perhaps see the added value of a backup node ($$) at gitlab.
But it is the one and only feature i am missing so not worth upgrading to EE for me.
As soon as an alternative (open source, self hosted, free) comes around that does have this built-in, i will be tempted to try it. (and of course on success i will move away from gitlab).
But for now, gitlab (CE) works best for me, self hosted.