How awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays?
Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.
How awful. It seems to be a pattern nowadays?
Some former colleagues still using gitlab ce tell me they also removed features from their self-hosted version, particularly from their runners.
Yeah, there's a trend of people who don't actually believe in software freedoms releasing a subset of their proprietary software under free software licenses and pretending.
It's really just a bait and switch to try to get free community engagement around a commercial product. It's fundamentally dishonest. I call it "open source cosplay". They're not real open source projects (in the sense that if you write a feature under a free software license that competes with their paid proprietary software, there's zero percent chance it will be upstreamed, even if all of the users of the project want it) so they shouldn't get the credit for being such just because they slapped a free software license on a fraction of their proprietary code.
Invariably they also want contributors to sign a rights-assignment CLA so they can reuse free software contributions (that they didn't pay for) in their for-profit proprietary project. Never sign a CLA that assigns rights.
Some open source projects flat-out illegally "relicensed" open source contributions as a proprietary license when they wanted to start selling software (CapRover). Some just start removing features or refuse to integrate features (Minio, Mattermost, etc). Many (such as Minio) use nonfree fake open source licenses like the AGPL[1].
It's all a scam by people who don't care about software freedoms. If you believe in software freedoms, you never release any software that isn't free software.
[1]: https://sneak.berlin/20250720/the-agpl-is-nonfree/
> the anti-privacy misfeature the AGPL requires that the software furnish its own source code to users over the network
This statement in the linked article is incorrect. It overlooks the "through some standard or customary means of facilitating copying of software" clause in section 12.
The software does not have to provide the source code _itself_. It must provide users a reference to such. A link to the Github repository on the about page, for example, would fulfill the requirement.