I have seen the feature of being able to customize the login screen come up in discussions about gitlab come up so many times, in so many places, and I usually see it met with "EE feature" or a community member saying something like "gitlab is open source just change the files on your server".
This seems like such a basic thing for an open source software like gitlab to just provide out of the box, i can't believe it isn't listed under your " ... an EE feature that is would come up frequently in these conversations ... " that you "would not hesitate to open source". Especially since at least several of the people you're replying to in this thread have mentioned it specifically.
Is gitlab really making enough income from enterprises who decide that this is the killer feature that they need to pay for EE to get?
It seems like a simple matter of moving the gitlab branding on the login page to the footer with a "powered by gitlab" type of thing and a logo.
Please don't take my meaning as a hateful rant, I love gitlab and personally manage 2 seperate deployments of gitlab CE, but i am not ashamed of saying that this is something of a frusteration to me, and I have a hard time taking this
>If there is an EE feature that is would come up frequently in these conversations we would not hesitate to open source it
statement seriously in light of how many times I have seen this seemingly harmless feature shot down for essentially no real reason.
I've made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/11489 to discuss.
While I get the sentiment, I don't think this helps. If you want to help the Open Source community, give us what we need in the form of open source. If I don't care about vendor lock-in I can go ahead and use GitHub. GitLab counts because its open source, and its open source version is the only thing the open source community should care about.