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Just did some work on my 'commercial freedom forges' page, collecting a list of businesses that make a sustainable living from developing or deploying free code software. Any suggestions for others to add? Corrections? Other comments?
https://www.coactivate.org/projects/disintermedia/for-profit-freedom-forges
@strypey GitLab is not fully-free, it's freemium / open-core whatever you want to call it. The fully-free community edition is completely usable as is, but there's many valuable features they retain as only "shared source" proprietary.
Unrelated, here's another reference article: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/market-research/history/software
@wolftune true, and these are the kinds of nuances I'm gathering the list to write about. But for me the key point is:
> The fully-free community edition is completely usable as is
I've also seen them move functions from the EE to the CE after being asked to in Hacker News threads, so they seem pretty genuine about serving the free code community as well as keeping the lights on. My suspicion is that EE users get to play with all the new toys first, but eventually everything migrates into CE.
@strypey Your impression is half-right, half-wrong. I've had conversations with the CEO, been involved in negotiations on these things…
GitLab is sincere about caring about free software and being transparent etc. They want to not sell out (though they did take VC investment).
While some features go from EE to CE, the list of EE features has *grown* not shrunk, and there's no pattern of consistently moving EE features to CE eventually. They may move others, or they may further distinguish…
@wolftune
> though they did take VC investment
I agree that's not idea, but it doesn't necessarily stop them from exiting by selling to their workers / customers / users/ deployers, instead of exiting via acquisition or IPO. #EquityCrowdfunding and new platforms like #OpenGift and #CoopExchange make that more likely to succeed.
@strypey GitLab is too far in on the VC-direction. They happen to be aiming for an IPO as their primary way to avoid acquisition (I'm not speculating, I know from conversation). I want to mount a campaign to convince them to look into being a Benefit Corp to lock-in their good values, but that may itself get objection from the VCs.
GitLab is probably the most, best, genuine free-software project of the NOT full-free software projects.
@wolftune
> GitLab is too far in on the VC-direction
Do you mean that the VCs own more than 50%? If not, the GL folks still get to choose. Don't they?
@strypey I don't know the exact percentages, but they very well may be majority-VC owned now. They're doing more of the stuff where they try to lock-in their values while selling to VCs rather than the side of taking VC funds just here and there and keeping ultimate control… but this area I don't know the details.
Exiting as a co-op would be amazing. I think that would be harder to sell them on, but worth investigating such a campaign.
@wolftune cool. I'd be happy to help a campaign to get GitLab to become a #PlatformCoop. Keep me in the loop.