Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to Gitlab you install on your hardware.

I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money.

A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.

(This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".)

Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run. It is more productive for society to give away limited product offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns.

If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)

You can excuse or justify it however you want. But it's still false and deceptive advertising to use "free" in situations like this.

To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying in data.

Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license, which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that statement.