A single contributor (oelmekki) had started integrating ActivityPub into GitLab, which could have been a huge win for the source forge, but despite praising him for it GitLab didn’t assign enough resources to help him out. Unsurprisingly oelmekki ran out of steam and now, a year or so later, Gitlab just closed the epic.
Comments have started coming in from the community (and customers) expressing their frustration with GitLab over the decision. The ticket was reopened but without an official communication.
If anything they see lost revenue because if users can federate companies will no longer buy licenses for external contractors’ access to internal repos, so where currently a single contractor employee results on however many companies they currently have projects for if this went through that number would drop to 1.
Plus someone might just make a servide solely responsible for providing users whoch can federate with gitlab which would implode theor business model. Unless they link federated users to the license in which case nobody would usemit. In either cese their business model stands in opposition to this.