The benefit would be that we avoid using privately owned SaaS. Community run GitLab or some other community run versioning system + project management software is closer step towards decentralization than using something owned by a privately held company. Look what happened now when Steem Inc is in trouble. And cost of running servers for versioning system and management software are not that high. Lots of providers give free resources for open sources projects. You get that later as a community, when companies see an opportunity in supporting a project, but it's possible. I remember when I worked within Joomla community lots of companies supported the project, they do it even now. Money wasn't an issue there.
IMHO if something is going to be used and developed by community then community should lean on open source tools which are running on community maintained resources.
What can be dangerous for community run projects is that leadership can be infiltrated by "politicians" which doesn't care about project as much as they care about their own personal goals. I saw that in some open source large scale projects. But there are mechanisms which can prevent that type of behavior.
Fair enough, ok. There are counter arguments to that, in that a commercial enterprise running the system has motivators to keep running it that are disconnected from the project - so might be more stable through tough times.. Plus, they won't pull out from the project and refuse to allow others access if they get annoyed with people personally ;)
Ultimately, a community hosted server will tend to be rented from a private company or alternatively will be controlled by members of the community. I guess the only way to improve on this from a decentralised perspective would be to host the project management itself on the blockchain ;)
I totally agree! I wonder why there isn't already a project management app made on Steem. :)
Or there is something like that?
I have never heard of one - it's a good project idea!