As a company, GitLab is dedicated to open source. Not only do we believe in it, but we use it, and we give back to it. Not just through GitLab, but through contributions to other open source projects.
The purpose of this page is to document how a GitLab employee can:
As an open source project, we want to stay healthy and be open for growth, but also ready to accommodate a 10x factor of our community. In order to achieve that, we've outlined a strategy that is a collaboration between multiple departments.
See Creating a new project for the instructions.
If you're contributing to an open source project on behalf of GitLab, you may be required to enter into a CLA.
If your GitHub account's primary email is not your @gitlab.com email, you can add it as an additional address. No need to create a separate account.
In the future, we might have a single organization for forks. That will allow us to track various metrics about contributions made by GitLab employees.
The guidance for using open source software, including details of which licenses are pre-approved for use, is now available in the Legal & Corporate Affairs handbook.
Avoid using forked code and try to contribute your change upstream.
It's typical for forks to fall far behind the upstream repository and such dependencies become a source of pain:
There may be good reasons to create a fork:
If you decide to create a fork, make sure you open an issue that:
Visit the Legal & Corporate Affairs Product handbook for further information on this.
