You're mistaken: The source code is available, but you're not allowed to use it without a valid subscription [1]! Only the GitLab Community Edition (CE) is freely usable without a license, the Enterprise Edition (EE) always requires a subscription.

To be honest I find the licensing situation more than confusing (even if the GitLab team continuously claims to be invested in Open Source) and I'm not too fond of it.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/blob/master/LICENSE

What is interesting is how EE only features get recreated by the community and have been bumped back into mainline gitlab as they blast past the internal proprietary code that is the EE. So long as the CE has a healthy developer community, there is always going to be a strong Libre Office or NextCloud like fork potential. GitLab are a bit naive about what this sort of pressure does in an open source context. So it'll be interesting to see the blow back. Either they'll soften up or they'll be replaced by a fork and they will (they always do) throw a tantrum and make their platform fully closed.

Our options as a project is a move to gnome's gitlab instance. Which wouldn't be "the best thing ever"(tm) but would move us one baby step closer to being on a real open platform. But we shouldn't do that right now, as a project we should feel some of the pressure from GitLab and give a good account of ourselves to the media when the times comes to tell them how disappointed we are.

Best Regards, Martin Owens