We have made significant saving on another product by putting a proxy doing Saml authentication in front of the app, rather than paying a crazy price that would have gotten us the Saml. Probably tougher to do for gitlab though.

This is what we in the Enterprise Software business call inbound marketing. LOL

This pretty much guarantees a phone call from your VP Engineering tag-teaming with the CFO.

Yep Gitea supports LDAP authentication out of the box. People often self-host Gitea but now there are a bunch of hosted-for-you gitea options like Digital Ocean, Cloudron, Stellarhosted and https://hostedgitea.com (disclaimer: I built hostedgitea.com).

Not sure if there is any special LDAP functionality, I don't know of, but we use Gitlab CE with LDAP at work. Also looking at the feature comparison [0], I can't find any LDAP related features in the paid versions, that aren't available in the free version. Maybe the feature you are using has been moved to Gitlab CE. Then you can move to the free version.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...

Look at [0], click at "compare more features" and search for ldap. For us it is mainly group sync and administrator sync that's missing.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

You were paying 48$/employee for a LDAP integration?

.. and happily so. We (few) devs like gitlab and it was a relatively cheap way to keep the devs happy. The feel-good factor about giving something back. Now it grows to a number that people will actually notice :/

Note that it's not the basic ldap authentication but ldap group sync and especially admin accounts in our case. Basic ldap auth works on the free plan. (ldap authed users take a subscription seat, which costs $0 on the free plan)

Why LDAP v.s. single sign with SAML?

$240 a year (per engineer) to keep your engineers focusing on providing product value is beyond paying for itself.

Building custom in house tooling always costs 5x more than engineers believe, and ultimately doesn't improve your end product. This kind of tooling would probably require at least 100 engineers to justify the innate cost of building and maintaining it.

At 1000 engineers, that's a fulltime engineer to support the "ldap+gitlab community fork"...

Realistically that takes a lot less than a fulltime engineer to support.

Of course this assumes no other value is acquired from the license, but if we take the comment at face value it seems worthwhile to just add it yourself.

Sounds like good side business idea. Good engineer could create it over weekend, than sell licenses and do support.

Seems somewhat unethical IMO (admittedly I'm not sure I can fully justify this feeling), and most good software engineers are paid enough to be able to be fairly ethical, but yes.

Why unethical? Person has obligations to themselfs and their family, not to some corporation they do not even work for.

I don't have a firm answer to this, it's more of a feeling that "this is wrong", but here are some possible arguments. I'm not sure they are the best possible arguments, but they're a quick first pass at making the argument.

It is good for society as a whole if people release their work publicly/open source. People will only release their work publicly/open source if it doesn't substantially hurt their potential earnings. So it's best to avoid taking advantage of publicly released work in ways that hurts their earnings (all else being equal).

Profit should go to the person who did the work making something. In this case gitlab did the work, and the person adding ldap here is almost entirely freeloading off of their work to make a profit. That isn't fair - especially when the freeloader has a direct negative impact on gitlab's earnings.

The person adding ldap support is not doing useful work for society, rather they are just doing busy work to redirect a stream of money towards them, that's not good.

And to add to all of these - the person doing this work is a competent engineer. They have lots of other ways to make money that are perfectly ethical, they do not need to resort to this.

Well, I doubt you have children. "Greater Good" can have two legs and hungry mouth.

I see opensource project that is missing usefull features and users who need them.

Why is "redirecting stream of money" towards me bad? Maybe I run orphanage and can use money more ethically...

Quite the contrary, I consider it a good thing that someone is helping out those companies that gitlab is giving up.

I guess something about competing with a group of people by using code that they almost exclusively developed feels wrong... but I'm not certain enough on this position to really argue it on the internet.

$240/yr/employee for an LDAP connector is absolutely INSANE.

You get way more than LDAP connectivity...

Doesn't matter that you get more if you don't make use of it anyway.

Plain LDAP auth is free. Advanced features that a big company might need are $240. Fine by me.

If you only need that, all the extra stuff is useless.

> $240 a year (per engineer)

That's a big part of the issue. It's not per engineer, as they don't allow mixing subscription levels.

So it's per everyone that needs some access.

I've written my own gitlab-ldap integration when I was at a startup, done purely with the gitlab API and a cron job. It took me half a day, and didn't have to touch the script for the three years it was in production afterwards.

So, no, this was absolutely productive. This isn't a particularly hard problem to solve.

true in general and usually more than 5x. some teams manage to turn it into 10, 20 and 40x

ldap integration sounds pretty simple though, so maybe not in this case