IMO being open-source isn’t such a minor deal, because it alleviates the worst-case scenario should Gitlab ever get acquired: if theoretical new management removes or changes price tiers, you can spin up your own on short notice. That management could reduce the effort put into maintaining their CE product or take it in an unfavorable direction and cause a fork, but the immediate damage is avoidable.
One possible caveat is performance. While I haven’t had to deal with this personally, some people reported that Gitlab can be a bit slow to run[0]. This doesn’t matter much if you use their hosted solution (if they have cash now, they can solve it by beefing up their hardware), but could result in higher than anticipated costs of running a self-hosted instance.
[0] Speaking of anecdotal evidence easy to find on HN and elsewhere. I’m yet to see any performance benchmarks comparing self-hosted versions of Gitlab and GitHub Enterprise (the latter starting at about $2500 per year) on similar hardware. It could well be that Gitlab is the fastest product for its maturity and feature set.
There are lot's of different projects internally. You have to remember that the cuban people does not have direct internet access, so is harder for Cubans to distribute their open source projects.
