[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.

[ksec]

Hopefully with all the Open Source switching to using Gitlab they would then have all the incentives to help make it even better and fast.