GitLab's new terms of service: are they acceptable?
GitLab's Open Source Program
Starting in July, we need to either apply to GitLab's Open Source program, pay for GitLab, or migrate away from GitLab.
I'm concerned about the Open Source agreement. I'll quote the blog post below, because it is more succinct, and more understandable:
Not seeking profit: Your organization must not seek to make a profit through services or by charging for higher tiers. Accepting donations to sustain your efforts is ok.
This requirement is contrary to how pretty much anyone makes money with Free Software. It is exactly through services that Free Software developers can make money: we don't make money from licensing. Even if we don't decide that our group wants to make money from Sequoia, if another developer comes along and wants to make money, are they allowed to do so? What if they contribute a patch to Sequoia? Are we then in violation of this agreement?
Publicly visible: Your GitLab.com group or self-managed instance and your source code must be publicly visible and publicly available.
We have a private repositories for private, internal notes. Do we need to delete this? Move this somewhere else?
Options
I think we should move away from GitLab, i.e., we should not apply to their Open Source program nor pay them. I see several options:
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Move to GitHub where most development is happening these days.
This has the advantage that issues affecting multiple projects are more tightly coupled. Also, my experience working with other projects is that collaboration across multiple forges slightly increases friction. In particular, when linking issues between rpm and rpm-sequoia, more had to be done by hand. In my experience, GitHub also has faster page load times than GitLab. Of course, GitHub is proprietary, which is arguably worse than GitLab's Open Core model, but that is not a reason in my mind to support an Open Core business.
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We could move to an external GitLab instance like 0xacab, which is run by riseup. In that case, we are still supporting and reliant on GitLab, and we are even further away from other developers.
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We move to an Open Source forge, like gitea. In this case we are much closer to Free Software ideals (free software, easy to migrate away, decentralized, etc.). I'd rather not self host, but I think we have enough money that we could contribute something.
I tend towards the last option, but I'd like to hear what others think.
@All