It provides a lot of the same features as GitHub, only you can self-host for free, contribute to development, and all the other niceties of a free project. A lot of people (myself included, and OP I suspect) believe it's also a particularly good project because GitHub has too much market share and influence in the free software ecosystem for a for-profit company.

Note that GitLab is a for-profit company as well. It's just that it aligns better with the open source values.

..and they have a commercial offering too. Unlike some other things I've seen, at least their commercial offering isn't crippled and mostly has things that specifically cater to enterprise customers (like Active Directory integration. The community edition still has basic LDAP).

> like Active Directory integration. The community edition still has basic LDAP

I manage our company's GitLab instance. It's connected to our massive AD and it works just fine - the only thing I really miss is LDAP group creation and assignment. GitLab uses only the name and email attributes from LDAP/AD either way, and I think if I have some spare time I'll just write a hourly cronjob that manages groups and assignments using the GitLab API.

Plus github has an agenda that has nothing to do with code, and excludes large segments of the public.

Your comment was killed (I just vouched for it) because of your unsubstantiated claims. Can you give some concrete examples of why you think this way?