This is a fork of the original branching model created by Vincent Driessen. When I tried too combine this tool with the Gitlab flow I experienced some difficulties.
There was no way you can force the users make a merge request in GitLab. I want that too control the quality of the master project. When designing there was no more room for the Develop branch, that's why it is gone. It is just too complicated with it. Everything is now based on the master branch. An hotfix is just a name for branch which does not live long (a bug) and a feature is a branch that can live much longer in the system, there is simply no difference. When you want too finish the hotfix you create a merge request in GitLab and it will be merged in the master trought GitLab. When the release manager decides that your feature is ready for release he/she will merge it in their release branch. Or you can create a merge request from your feature too the master.
git-flow is published under the liberal terms of the BSD License, see the LICENSE file. Although the BSD License does not require you to share any modifications you make to the source code, you are very much encouraged and invited to contribute back your modifications to the community, preferably in a Github fork, of course.
An easy way install git-flow is using the original git-flow installer, which can perform system-wide installation like so:
$ curl -Ol https://raw.githubusercontent.com/thijsbekke/gitflow/develop/contrib/gitflow-installer.sh $ chmod +x gitflow-installer.sh $ sudo ./gitflow-installer.sh\