As the news broke that Microsoft was acquiring GitHub, panicked users started to move their accounts to GitLabs, a fully open source implementation of Linus Torvalds Git.
While many leading figures of the open source world argues that GitHub is actually now in a more accountable and reliable position compared to earlier, because Microsoft will be treading carefully so as to not stain the positive image the company has been building with the open source community.
However, that didn’t stop users from move away from GitHub. Sensing an opportunity, GitLabs dropped pricing for its self-hosted GitLab Ultimate plan and its hosted Gold plan; both plans are now available for free to open source projects and educational institutions.
In an interview to Frederic Lardinois of TechCrunch, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said[1], “Most education and open source projects don’t have access to enhanced security or performance management tools for their software projects. At GitLab, we are happy to have achieved a level of success that allows us to extend the full set of features to these important communities by offering GitLab Ultimate & GitLab Gold plans for free.”
A caveat, these prices have been dropped, but these users won’t get any commercial support form GitLabs that paying users get.