Chiming in here as the cofounder of an 'open core' company:
This obviously wasnt handled as well as it could have been.
On the fundamental issue of building EE features:
If 100% of the code was open source, there would be less incentive for them to continue to maintain, update, upgrade the product. The EE features ensures that there is an incentive for them to continue to work on this project. Infact, the community _should_ want project maintainers to be compensated.
As someone else said, the project is open source, you can always fork and add any specific feature you want. It comes down to how useful is the actual open source project. If it is very limited in features and functioning, then yes - it is against the spirit of the open source. But if its a fully usable, functioning product (not for all but atleast some number of usecases), then it has created value which it is not capturing for itself - which is a net good for society and the industry.
This is a balanced article and I definitely agree about being clear on what constitutes competition. A few questions:
1. Does Gitlab see much competition from hyperscale providers like AWS?
2. Given that Gitlab has a thicker proprietary crust and a relatively smaller open source core (compared to hashi), is Gitlab more insulated from these types of issues?
The metric to measure how expensive equity is sounds flawed. Expected earnings divided by share price is not indicative of actual equity returns - especially over 1 year?
