Like the author's group of friends, mine has stopped throwing LAN parties. I think our last ones were around early WoW time.
However, large LAN parties are far from being dead. There's Dreamhack and the like, and my alma mater runs a huge 2000+ players LAN event every year (https://lanets.ca/). It seems like it's become more of a grand event, as opposed to the couple times a year gathering with a handful of friends.
As a guy in his late 20s, it's really interesting to see how gaming has evolved and democratized itself during the past couple decades.
Good to note that self hosting Gitlab (CE in my case) is a breeze. I'm pretty bad at infra and sysadmin stuff and I've been maintaining an instance for a group of friends for about a year now with no issue.
Installation is easy, upgrading (even between major versions) is completely painless, you get integration with Gitlab Continuous Integration, the Community Edition doesn't feel artificially gimped to get you to switch to a paid plan, Gitlab is great at fixing security issues. I also love the UX and it's not missing any feature in my experience compared to GitHub/Bitbucket.
I'm not affiliated with Gitlab in any way but it's honestly one of the rare pieces of software I only have praise for.
I just want to say (since you're here and this is a post about Gitlab) that your product is awesome.
A few friends and I spun up our own instance of the CE about a week ago because we weren't too happy about Github's stance. It was incredibly easy to set up and it works flawlessly on a small 1 core, 2Gb VM.
A little off topic but can you share the effect the recent Github stuff has had for Gitlab? Did you get a lot more traffic?
> The article also doesn't mention how GPL is a show-stopper at some companies where we are building proprietary solutions.
> Oracle, IBM, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Boeing all are monetized empires that profit not just from binary blobs, but from providing a superior product. Also, being the patent holder is lucrative.
I'm really not a huge fan of the GPL but you have to realize those are by design. To a supporter of the license, that's actually a plus.
> How do you intend on running a business and feeding your employees, let alone making investors happy following the virtues of GPL? Consulting and support only goes so far.
If the GPL doesn't fit your business plan, just don't use it. Do you see Open-Source projects using leaked closed-source code (or complaining that they can't do so)? No one is preventing companies from rewriting equivalent code and the authors had the right to select whatever terms they wanted when they created their project. It's their creative output after all.
How are you getting these printed and shipped? Do you do it yourself or consume a 3rd party service?