Thanks for your perspective and naming the features you would like to see in GitLab CE. Can I ask what open source project you are considering to host on-premises with GitLab CE?
I agree that falsely accusing people of looking at the EE code would be very bad. So far we only once declined a contribution to CE by claiming it was EE code, in this case the code was verbatim, the diff showed a zero character difference. Future calls will be harder but we'll try to prevent false declines.
One example would be KDE, who considered Gitlab but ended up going with Phabricator because they are one of those 100+ developer projects that wanted the LDAP, analytics, logging, etc but also being a major open source software community wouldn't settle to not dogfood free software, and the CE was missing too much at the time.
Personally, I much prefer Gitlabs project -> code / issues / milestones / etc workflow over Phabricator's git / issues milestones -> projects workflow, and love using Gitlab, but there are a lot of free software communities (Gnome, Freedesktop.org, among others) who are almost certainly going to try moving to more modern project management services in the near future and will be forced away from the IMO best UX Gitlab offers for ones like gogs / phabricator that both sate their needs for a free software solution that also has the featureset for these thousand+ developer ecosystems.
Currently GitLab has LDAP, analytics, and logging. I'm glad you like the UX of GitLab. I'm not sure what essential features are still missing from it in your opinion. Can you elaborate?
I'm not one of the KDE web devs that run their infrastructure, I'm just a project contributor / maintainer. There has been some historical recording of the process that led to KDE having to give up on the idea, though:
Thanks for the links. I'm sorry I never got the chance to talk to the KDE people and address the concerns we had. We're always open to adding or open sourcing features that are needed by large open source projects.
We do try to open source features that are requested by open source projects, such as the branded login page after a HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690
I agree that falsely accusing people of looking at the EE code would be very bad. So far we only once declined a contribution to CE by claiming it was EE code, in this case the code was verbatim, the diff showed a zero character difference. Future calls will be harder but we'll try to prevent false declines.
More about this our criteria to merge CE contributions if they are already in EE can be found in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship