[mikekchar]

This may be completely unfair, but I think it's a drawback of the business model they have. When you have an "open core" that you don't charge for, you have to have something that you can charge for. If you make the "enterprise edition" performant with good UX and the "community edition" slow and clunky then you threaten to kill off your potential user base. On the other hand, if you spend all your time improving the core, then there is nothing for people to buy. The prudent thing to do is to do as little as possible on the "core" because it is essentially a marketing expense. You need to invest as much as possible in the extensions that bring in revenue.

Personally, I'm not a big fan of "open core" systems for this reason. I'd really prefer that companies like GitLab concentrated on actual services rather than trying to sell software. Having an "open core" can in some ways poison the core for outside development because you usually have to allow your code in the enterprise versions (or maintain your own forked copy). This is one of the reasons why Ghostscript never got the outside help that it really deserved (let's face it -- who uses a free software system and doesn't use Ghostscript?) The fact that nobody pays for it -- or even contributes -- was at one point a pretty sore issue for the author.

I love the fact that GitLab contributes useful free software to the world. I am disappointed that their business plan relies on selling proprietary software. I honestly believe they would be in a better place if they took a different approach, but they have always very politely disagreed with me when I've mentioned it ;-).

[sytse]

I'll try to very politely disagree :)

We tried charging for services: donations, paid feature development, and paying for support. None of them scaled and we moved to open core which allowed us to spend much more time on performance, security, installation, and dependency upgrades.

We want to make sure that the open source version of GitLab is just as performant and has an equally good UX as the enterprise version. There is no difference in the UX and there are no proprietary performance optimizations in the enterprise version.

There are some things that we see as a feature but that you could see as a performance item. An example is the SSH lookup in a database that used to be in enterprise and landed in the open source version in this release.

[tyldum]

I was a fan, and we got an Enterprise license when it was the only tier offered. Now there's two tiers above EES with insane price jumps. I can only assume there will be even more tiers introduced so we decided not to upgrade. We use GitLab as a platform for the whole company, but only a handful will use EEP/EEU features. An upgrade would be inhibitivly expensive or we must reduce the number of licenses to a fraction of the employees.

[mikekchar]

Hey, you guys are running a business and I'm running a commentary :-) This stuff is hard enough that what-ifs and naysayers are going to crop up. One of these days I should just put my money where my mouth is. I think the scaling issue is definitely a huge problem and even Cygnus said they found it extremely difficult. I'm not sure it's possible to get the ROI you need if you accept VC, so given your current position, it's not really fair for me to criticise.