At GitLab, our mission is to change all creative work from read-only to read-write so that everyone can contribute.
The GitLab for Open Source program supports GitLab's mission by empowering and enabling open source projects with our most advanced features so that they can create greater impact and amplify the contribution mindset within their spheres of influence.
This program's vision is to make GitLab the best product for Open Source projects to thrive at scale.
Apart from actively maintaining and constantly adding value to the open source Community Edition, GitLab makes the Enterprise Edition's top Ultimate and Gold tiers available free-of-cost to qualifying open source projects.
Note: If you want to host your personal project on GitLab.com and you decide to make it publicly visible instead of private, you will automatically have access to GitLab's Gold features when you create a Free account. To access Gold features at the group level (to enable things like epics, roadmaps, merge requests, and other Gold features for groups), you'll need to upgrade to our paid Gold plan or you may consider applying for this GitLab for Open Source program.
In order to qualify, your projects must meet the following program requirements:
See our full terms regarding this program. For more questions, please see our GitLab for Open Source FAQ or contact us at opensource@gitlab.com
The first place to look if you have questions is always the GitLab Docs site. Our team keeps this updated so that it's the single source of truth, and it has answers to a wide variety of questions you may face.
If you can't find what you're looking for in our docs, consider asking in the GitLab Forum. There, you can interact with other members of our community and many GitLab employees. Even if you don't have questions, we encourage you to join the forum and meet other members of our community!
In line with our Transparency value, GitLab has an open roadmap, so you can always see what's ahead in the product priorities.
Your feedback helps us to build the best product possible. Whether it's a bug report, a feature request, or feedback to our company, here's a guide for how to submit feedback.
Make sure to Thumbs Up issues.
Our team looks at the numbder of Thumbs Up votes as an indicator for priority, so make sure you're using that feature on issues as a quick way to give us feedback. Writing detailed comments of your use-case and thorough issue desciptions is another way you can help make it easier for our team to understand your needs and respond to your questions.
Just search for relevant issues on the GitLab product project, and start giving us your feedback!
If you're part of a large open source organization that is planning a migration to GitLab, please consider creating a public issue to track your progress.
Public migration tracking issues help us understand which issues are blockers, urgent, important, and nice-to-have for your organization. It also has the added benefit of helping you get used to our workflow so that you can start giving us product feedback and help us improve the product together.
Follow these steps to create a public migration tracking issue:
gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab projectMigrations template in the description section where it prompts you to select a template, and click on Apply templateExamples of public issue trackers:
Priority Support While our GitLab for Open Source program does not include paid support, members of the program receive a 95% discount on Priority Support. You can purchase support for $4.95 per user per month by sending us an email to opensource@gitlab.com and requesting an add-on.
Migration Services If you're looking for help with your migration, our team provides a variety of services to help. Check out our professional services page for more information.
Additional services We sometimes hear requests for services we do not provide, such as providing hosting for Community Edition instances. We've partnered with others to help expand the options for our users. Check out our Technology Partners to learn more.
There are a number of organizations that offer open source programs with discounts or free services just for open source projects. Here is a list of some of the programs we know that have been useful to pair with the GitLab for Open Source program:
Here is more information on how the GitLab for Open Source program operates.
GitLab creates Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) per quarter. Here are the current OKRs for the GitLab for Open Source program:
Epics, issue boards, and labels are used to track our work. For more information on the specific ones we use, please visit the Community Relations project management page.
We keep track and publicly display the members who have successfully applied to the GitLab for Open Source Program at https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/projects/. Whenever an application is approved, and as part of the process, the project is added to a master list on the /gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/gitlab-oss repository.
While ideally this would be all that is required to display the members on the website, there is currently a manual step involved in transferring the file from the /gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/gitlab-oss repository to the GitLab's website repository.
Follow these steps to update the GitLab for Open Source members list on the website:
/gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/gitlab-oss repositorydata/oss_projects.yml file At this time, the master list on the /gitlab-com/marketing/community-relations/gitlab-oss repository is only updated for applications, not for renewals. As such, it might contain data from projects who initially applied for the program but did not renew their yearly license.
We use the GitLab for Open Source report on Salesforce (SFDC), along with the Eduoss script, to generate a report on:
The steps below will generate the GitLab for Open Source Program metrics:
Run Report to generate the report.Export Details. Choose Unicode (UTF-8) for the Export File Encoding and .csv for the Export File Format. Then click Export and save the file../edoss.rb -i <exported_file>.csv -o <output_file>.csvyaml and json formats in addition to .csv.If this is your first time running the report, here's a checklist of things you'll need to make sure you have first:
Campaign Name, Opportunity Name, Close Date, Products Purchased, Account Name, Stage
Campaign Name equals "2018_OSS" AND Stage equals "Closed Won"EditRemove AND Type equals "New Business"
CustomizeFilters > Add: Field FilterStage :: equals :: Closed Won.OKchmod 755 edoss.rbThe GitLab Open Source Partners program seeks to build relationships with open source projects that have thousands of community members or users (or more). Through our partnership, we aim to gain insight to help us build a better product and navigate the challenges of being an open core, for-profit company. We also aim to create greater outreach through co-marketing and special initiatives.
Hi [Name],
We'd like to invite you to join our GitLab Open Source Partners program [1]. This program's aim is to feature your project in blogs, at GitLab events, and more, while also helping us engage with your community more regularly and learn more about your experience using GitLab. Since you're already part of our GitLab for Open Source program [2], and are a prominent open source project, we would love to have you as an open source partner. Just as an FYI, there are no membership dues for this program as it is completely free of cost.
Please let me know if you're interested in connecting to learn more about this partnership opportunity. Feel free to grab time on my calendar for a short call: [calendly link], or if you prefer to chat more via email, we can do that too.
Best, [Name]
We define Consortiums as (often open source) groups that have come together to further a technology cause. The prototypical Consortium would be the Linux Foundation (LF), which is a non-profit technology consortium founded in 2000 as a merger between Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. The Linux Foundation's mission is to standardize Linux, support its growth, and promote its commercial adoption. It hosts and promotes the collaborative development of open source software projects.
Consortiums are marketing giants in the enterprise technology ecosystem. The success of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation today, the OpenStack foundation in the past, and many others, prove the value of technology thought leadership, branding, and engineering alignment. While these memberships sit within the budget of the Community Team's Open Source program, the Developer Evangelism team focuses on consortium marketing and integrating into the community to bring the GitLab technical perspective to the right conversations.
Here are some of the factors we keep in mind when considering to join a new consortium:
| Goals | Indicators | Examples of Indicators |
|---|---|---|
| Awareness Opportunities | Size of organization / contributor / member base: how many people are part of the organization’s community? | Monthly authenticated vs. non authenticated users visiting the sit. Annual users who perform a contribution activity of any kind. Annual users who perform a code-related contribution activity |
| Frequency and impact of marketing opportunities: what kind of communication channels do they have? Will we appear in official channels? How prominent is our placement? | Channels may include: Social, Newsletters, Blogs, Events (Size of each event) | |
| Ease of Collaboration | Dedicated marketing resources / point person: Does the organization have marketing capacity? | How mature is the organization's brand and marketing portions? Is marketing handled by volunteers, paid employees? |
| Relationship: how responsive is the person in charge of the relationship? | An alternative metric might be: Time-to-Execute for a few standard communication types. For example: from case study ideation to execution - 1 week? 1 month? 1 quarter? | |
| Understanding of community gates: Can the foundation approve directly - is there a community feedback process, is board approval required, etc | ||
| Contribution and hiring pool opportunities | Active community: How active is the community and do they know their own community’s health, engagement, etc? | Frequency of contribution? Rate of adoption? |
| Hiring opportunities: Are there opportunities to recruit from the community's talent pool? | What is the growth of the community or foundation itself? Are there job opportunities within that software ecosystem (are people hiring contributors from this community in general)? Are there job boards, or other professional development activities? | |
| What kind of informal and formal ways are there for us to contribute, and do they align with our interests? | Working groups? Advisory boards? Special initiatives? | |
| Can GitLab participate in the project's roadmap in ways that creates mutual value? | Example: Promoting adoption of GitLabCI to improve project testing and also expose contributors to GitLab's tools for their day-jobs/for-profit ventures. |
We are currently members of the following consortiums:
| Consortium | Level |
|---|---|
| Linux Foundation | Silver - board seat |
| Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) | Silver - board seat |
| Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS) | Silver |
| Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) | General |
Full details of our memberships with these organizations is available to GitLab team members only: Community Relations Consortium Memberships.
We have a small budget to sponsor events that allow us to engage with and build relationships among our current open source partners' communities. All other event sponsorship requests, are handled by our field marketing team.
