Re: Should we apply for GitLab's open source program?

[Alex Bennée]

Paolo Bonzini <bonzini@gnu.org> writes:

> On 17/09/20 01:39, Bradley M. Kuhn wrote:
>> One thing to note is that my understanding is that most of what you're
>> getting access to through this program is proprietary software features that
>> GitLab offers as add-ons.
>
> Basically all we need is the increased access to the CI environment (not
> just 400 minutes), and none of the add-on features.  Self-hosting would
> of course help but we'd have to pay for the hardware resources to run
> the CI, and have someone that can keep the hardware running.

It seems for the time being that public CI is still unlimited. The idea
of making our position as an FLOSS project "official" was to preempt any
changes to that might come down the track.

The question of using proprietary features hadn't come up beyond a
hand-waving of "ohh there is a long list". We are however thinking about
consolidating some of our more disparate infrastructure onto gitlab so
it's mostly in one place - for example the bug tracker currently hosted
on launchpad. Personally I'd think it's unlikely we want to move things
like the mailing lists which are currently on nongnu (via Savannah).

Ultimately as developers having to manage infrastructure is a bit of a
time-sink and currently it's hard for volunteer admins to be as
responsive as cloud-scale hosting companies who's income from non-free
software hosting pays for all our server time. If there was a free
software only instance of GitLab which offered the same level of service
I would personally be interested but I don't know how much of the
projects income could be diverted to supporting that versus the travel
bursaries and other such things we usually spend our money on.

In this regard FLOSS projects are both leaches on paid for services as
well as being useful public facing PR for a SaaS platforms abilities.

-- 
Alex Bennée