How so? I used both at work and they're functionally the same.
Choosing one over the other is just a matter of details. How well it integrates with the corporate network, how pretty it looks, the options regarding CI/CD integration, overall popularity and community, etc... Last time I got to choose, I went with Gitea, because performance was good and it met my needs.
This sounds pretty annoying though: https://docs.gitlab.com/administration/license_usage/
I'm not sure, you'd have to check their pricing pages.
They take contributions but not if they would add the equivalent of a paid feature to the free version, they see it as reducing the value of enterprise in any way or just going against their vision. It's clearly a company run project, not even a hybrid like Redis or VSCode.
And, dare I say it? There is a place for GitLab in a world where most development happens with coding agents. Its perfectly fine to be the version control & CI place. But they got stupid management (just like Atlassian or GitHub) that have convinced themselves they must be the orchestrator, the middleman, the gatekeeper to inference. They neither are nor will be that and if they go down the path of Copilot trying to ruin their product to make it happen, it will be the end.
Deploy contains the released versions and packages.
Operate is for Infrastructure as Code.
Analyze are project and CI statistics.
I doubt you want to remove any of them, they are quite needed functionality.
Which would be sad, because then quite a nice project is going to die.