It's proprietary software with extra steps to trick people into giving a company the respect that comes with free software. To quote Andrew Miloradovsky:
The reason why many companies insist on using "permissive" licenses is because they're having an "open core" business model, and want to be able to include the work of external contributors into their proprietary versions, without asking the contributors to sign any kind of agreement.
I know multiple people working on multiple projects who would have been entirely willing and able to pay for the enterprise feature-set, were it not proprietary. It's not even a good business model! Solely aimed at large companies, GitLab has no regard for individual users or foundations & groups producing free software. Some people make the argument that because they offer the proprietary patches to free software projects at cost of nothing more than freedom, they do have regard for them, but that's a ridiculous argument: BitBucket was gratis for free software too.
The reason why many companies insist on using "permissive" licenses is because they're having an "open core" business model, and want to be able to include the work of external contributors into their proprietary versions, without asking the contributors to sign any kind of agreement.
I know multiple people working on multiple projects who would have been entirely willing and able to pay for the enterprise feature-set, were it not proprietary. It's not even a good business model! Solely aimed at large companies, GitLab has no regard for individual users or foundations & groups producing free software. Some people make the argument that because they offer the proprietary patches to free software projects at cost of nothing more than freedom, they do have regard for them, but that's a ridiculous argument: BitBucket was gratis for free software too.