[scrupulusalbion]

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.

[sytse]

We want to give people using GitLab CE an awesome upgrade experience too https://twitter.com/J_Salamin/status/687884326629937152 so limiting our packages server to just EE is not an option.

We tried charging only for support but now that we have the Omnibus packages it is rare for users to need support (and we like it that way).