Thanks for the feedback on the GitLab for Education program. In the spirit of iteration, we started the program as an MVC - offering free licenses for teaching and learning related purposes. The program has grown significantly since then and through meaningful feedback from our members, we’ve come to realize the structure is not ideal for Universities to implement at an enterprise level. We have an epic open to restructure the program and welcome constructive input. https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/marketing/community-rel...

Thanks for reaching out through hn. I will take a look at the epic you linked. Those are indeed many issues we faced (and other universities as well. there was even a discussion of somehow trying to license one github instance for all universities in the state although I'm not sure if this ever amounted to anything)

I'm really interested in the development of this issue so thank you again for reaching out.

Ok I can't edit my original comment so just to clarify:

GitLab doesn't serve ads it only pushes out messages to users that they could have a better product if only the admin would shill out some bucks.

It's ok if admin settings are greyed out with a remark like in old freewares to tell you features you could have in the enterprise product, but if the software tells any user that they are missing out it is more unnescessary work for the admin to explain that we don't have the money to pay for every single student, most of which only create an account without pushing any code, just so that the search can work over all wikis and not only the selected one.

So again it's more like the "buy winrar" or "go pro now" nag and _not ads_. Sorry for the confusion

> The community edition is a castrated mess with ads in it.

I understand your frustration with FOSS pushing you toward buying proprietary software.

But your lede will mislead people into thinking CE gets revenue by serving up third-party ads because that is what "ads" mean for web services 99.99% time the term is used on HN.

Are ads a new thing? I self host gitlab but haven't used the UI much as it is only a personal repo.

I called it ads, but it really is more the promotion of enterprise features and yes it is "new" since it only started popping up in the last year or so. It also seems that they are trying to dial it back, but gitlab really started getting aggressive with annoying little things like that and is getting on my nerves from time to time.

On a positive note it got quite a bit more responsive in the last 4 or 5 five years since I started hosting it and even thought we got some regressions and bugs and problems with releases we didn't have any data loss (that we know of) or major security problems. Most of the security problems are in the enterprise functionality anyway (elasticsearch and grafana pop up regulary)

How about antispam features, are those still only for Enterprise?

Sorry since I only provide access to students, faculty and collaborating universities (so no open registration) I never needed antispam functionality, but can't remember seeing any entry in the administration interface or config as well.