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by ensignavenger 1340 days ago
There a lots of features in gitlab that are closed source that I, as small, one man shop, would like to have. I do think gitlab does a much better job of balancing proprietary versus open source features than most open core products, but the incentive still seems to be there to keep useful features back.
2 comments
nyanpasu64 1340 days ago
One example is global cross-repo search. When looking for substrings on KDE or GNOME's Gitlab, I often want to use the global search bar, but there is no free full-text search across all repositories hosted there, and I have to rely on code search tools external from the code hosting site's UI, like KDE's https://lxr.kde.org/.
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dnsmichi 1340 days ago
GitLab team member here.

You can make suggestions to move features between tiers, i.e. moving a paid feature to the free tier, by opening an issue following https://about.gitlab.com/company/pricing/#changing-tiers-and...

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no_wizard 1340 days ago
While I appreciate one can do this, it doesn't mean it will happen, and doesn't really answer the OPs question head on.

Which is, does GitLab intentionally evaluate certain features to be behind the paywall to boost sales?

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sfink 1340 days ago
Why wouldn't they? I guess I don't see why the question needs to be asked. There are more interesting questions to be asked about how GitLab makes such decisions.

If there's a feature that is mostly only valuable to pointy-haired bosses, then of course there will be people who want that feature to be available for free. But such a feature should be behind the paywall. It will end up funding features outside of the paywall, so the free users have a reason to be happy about it being behind the paywall.

Of course there will be lots of things in the middle, and people will disagree on every aspect of the evaluation. And people will argue that something should be free because it's good for the community when in fact they want it to be free because they don't want to pay for it. Such is the nature of the balancing act that GitLab signed up for, and I respect them for it.

It's a relatively new spin on the ancient balancing act of value creation vs value capture. TANSTAAFL

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no_wizard 1340 days ago
I think we're coming at it the same way, but I'm being more terse in my question line.

I am interested in how they arrive in those decisions and do revenue generation features / fixes get weighted differently than non, or are those types of tasks separate from their revenue potential or retention?

I think I'm just leaning on the OP for this context, but I should have added it.

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