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It's not in line with their business model of running a propriety SaaS.


There are ways to monetize open source. GitHub could make the repository/PR code open source and host the repo management/hooks/actions/etc code for enterprise.


Github is a company not a community project though, they don't gain anything by going open source, it makes no sense to do so.

There are hidden costs to going open source as well as expected ones. Could you imagine the number of PRs, issues and discussions over trivial shit the GitHub userbase would create against an open GH repo? Nightmare. Not to mention code cleanliness expectations and buildability expectations and so on.

Of course they "could do this" or "do it that way," but the fact that they don't should tell you their priorities lie elsewhere, and that's fine. Closed source isn't evil and we have other open source git hosting platforms.


Their nearest competitor is open core and very far behind. Sure, there are ways to monetize - fewer and more difficult ways.


Far behind in terms of popular usage maybe, but IMHO it's far more advanced features-wise and it's probably more popular in enterprises.


> it's probably more popular in enterprises.

It’s popular because it’s free.


Which in many cases leads to a project that is ultimately better, for reasons beyond just its licensing.

Gitlab has always seemed a little clunky to me from the perspective of running a smaller operation.




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