The external developer who started the work and was highly praised by Gitlab offered to work for them if they made a team around federation --> nothing.
A group of French universities are now considering making a group in order to work on it themselves and contribute back to Gitlab.
Gitlab will most likely use it as a big selling point once all the work has been done by externals with little to no cost to Gitlab.
They may advertise it, but they’d be working on it themselves if they thought it would bring in serious revenue.
I encourage you to actually read the link before making such a statement.
Anti Commercial-AI license