Remember, please, that GitLab the software is Open Source!
There's one critical thing that's missing from this article: GitLab, the software, is an open-source software!
However much GitLab might try to lean on the fact that GitLab dot com offers some Enterprise Edition features -- not fully open-source -- to free users, the GitLab product stems from an open-source background and the core functionality certainly is still open-source. Many of the supposed freeloaders contributed patches and debugging time and feedback and well researched issue reports and other input into that product!
It is quite dishonest for GitLab dot com, the commercial entity, to simply sum up the cost of keeping some hard-drives spinning! They also should perform the impossible calculation of how much of their income from actual paying customers should rightly be attributed to work from the community they're now spurning.
I don't think anyone on the open-source side of this equation was or is complaining that GitLab dot com brings in income from exploiting the open-source portion of their code base -- it's within the terms of the license. But, to appreciate exactly *why* this feels like a massive rug-pull to many of us, ask this: would anybody have ever contributed to GitLab open-source, had they know they were just free labour for a corporation that chooses to optimise its bottom-line at the expense of this very community -- pretty much just like any other capitalist corporation?
Prolly not, yeah? Capitalism and community don't mix!
I mean, I'm bitter because I've just had to spend a tonne of my time migrating from self-hosted GitLab to self-hosted Gitea. This, it turns out, was a very good decision but I rather liked GitLab, back in the day, and do somewhat resent the way that they've been treating GitLab CE users as second-class citizens for a while -- pretty much making from-source builds too onerous to bother with, forcing the use of Omnibus or official, bloated Docker images, and pushing U.I. junk that can't be disabled, readily, in CE, that nobody asked for, but does nothing but plug an EE-only feature.
The writing has rather been on the wall for at least some years!