So, interestingly enough, I recently swapped my #gitlab instance for #heptapod just for the #mercurial support.
Heptapod is a fork of GitLab that mostly just adds Mercurial, but that also means it's still the same base code, which is a lot of Ruby.
Ruby being interpreted... and the way that GitLab's "enterprise" features are handled, I almost wonder if enabling them without a license is as simple as finding the license check in the distributed ruby files and patching it out.

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Note: I don't usually condone actions like that, though it's an interesting idea to say the least, even if I'm to assume that GitLab's code is a fair bit more sophisticated than that. Please don't go and start poking around in either code base for the purpose of patching out the paywall(s).

Second note: I can only imagine what chaos I'm about to cause, given the origins of "Heptapod" which is decidedly not part of software development or anything in this field.