[HN Gopher] Gitlab from YC to IPO
___________________________________________________________________
Gitlab from YC to IPO
Author : sandslash
Score : 480 points
Date : 2021-10-14 13:31 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.ycombinator.com)
| prabhatjha wrote:
| What a success story for yet another open source project
| xtracto wrote:
| Well, kind of... Gitlab is another of those Freemium "open
| source" services where you have to pay to have the full
| functionality.
| system2 wrote:
| That's fair to me.
| prabhatjha wrote:
| Exactly.
| teh_klev wrote:
| "He used to joke that his home office was the biggest GitLab Inc.
| office in the world because his _EA_ would work there as well. "
|
| Maybe my brain is in a post-lunchtime stupor, but what or who is
| an "EA"?
| [deleted]
| villaaston1 wrote:
| Executive assistant I think in this case, though I've seen
| enterprise architect too!
| dabeeeenster wrote:
| Executive Assistant
| [deleted]
| alphalima wrote:
| Executive Assistant?
| teh_klev wrote:
| Thank you everyone.
| karolist wrote:
| Electronic Arts
| bytematic wrote:
| Acronyms/Initialisms are great right?
| jedberg wrote:
| I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to
| invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the
| time was that no open source company had ever been super
| successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a
| pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against
| GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded.
|
| I honestly didn't think they stood a chance.
|
| I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team
| on their successful exit!
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| I am always reminded how not so great ideas or even clones when
| executed well lead to good outcomes.
| klysm wrote:
| I think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab
| would've had a way harder time.
| jbergens wrote:
| Gitlab was earlier/better at letting companies install a
| version on-prem.
| mcronce wrote:
| Their CI story was also a lot better until Github added
| Actions
| polote wrote:
| Github is initially B2B SMB and B2C and Gitlab is B2B
| Enterprise. 10% of Github employee are sales , 25% for
| Gitlab. I would say they are not even competitors
| paxys wrote:
| Disagree. Github's self-hosted product is trash compared to
| Gitlab. Plus they were very late to the game when it came to
| stuff like CI, package management, project tracking and a
| whole suite of enterprise features. Github had (and still
| has) a huge lead in public open-source development, but
| that's it.
| polote wrote:
| If every investor was apologizing when a company he passed on
| became successful they would not have any time to do investing
| anymore.
|
| For any criteria (open source or github as a competitor in that
| case) you will find some company that became successful. Even
| the worst one.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| Dont worry, as a corporate user, it's a nightmare: it wont
| last.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| It's really bloated but it's gonna live and get better over
| time. Gitlab feels super slow compared to GitHub but it also
| has more features.
|
| I'm personally extremely pro Source Hut but it's not ready
| yet: https://sr.ht
| taytus wrote:
| >which was more of an outlier than a pattern
|
| If you are looking to invest in patterns what makes you
| special?
|
| I thought the idea was to look for outliers.
| jedberg wrote:
| VCs are the most risk averse people you will meet. They
| pretty much only look for patterns. That's why it's so hard
| for minority/female founders -- because it doesn't fit their
| pattern. I actually invest mostly in minority/female founders
| for exactly this reason.
|
| Also, I never said I was any good. :)
| nodesocket wrote:
| I'll echo a sentiment I also had but perhaps I was wrong. I
| believed that users of GitLab used GitLab because they didn't
| want to pay a premium (or pay at all) for GitHub; thus I viewed
| it as a cheaper alternative in the same vein as buying a
| Hyundai vs buying a Mercedes. I assumed only frugal
| "developers" were using it, and surely any legit companies
| would opt for the superior GitHub.
| mr_cyborg wrote:
| Interesting comparison with cars, I would think a Hyundai is
| much more reliable and less expensive to maintain than a
| Mercedes, and Hyundai is now being positioned as a more
| premium brand than it once was.
|
| On topic, GitLab is great at CI/CD and awesome for self-
| hosting things.
| [deleted]
| maxsilver wrote:
| Just one user here, but I definitely _prefer_ GitLab over
| GitHub.
|
| Not because GitHub is bad in any particular way, I just like
| the feature set and UI of GitLab better. Less of a "Hyundai
| vs Mercedes" thing, and more of a "Ford vs Chevy" thing.
|
| They're both decent and they both have approximately the same
| level of "premium-ness". They're just feature-wise and
| aesthetically slightly different in arbitrary ways. And some
| people either do or don't vibe better with the one or the
| other.
| specialist wrote:
| Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like
| maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?
| jedberg wrote:
| I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter
| what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on
| investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most
| important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides
| the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to
| sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential
| employees, sell their vision to journalists and potential
| customers, etc.
|
| If I'm not convinced to invest after one meeting, I usually
| don't invest. On the other hand, if I'm convinced after five
| minutes, I'm usually asking where to send the wire by the end
| of the meeting.
|
| Armory is a good example of an open source/open core company
| I _did_ invest in. They had me convinced in just a few
| minutes. They had an answer for every one of my objections
| and made me feel like I 'd be missing out if I didn't invest.
| And so far they're doing really well and it's one of my best
| investments to date.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > _...how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as
| us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for
| a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of
| having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their
| vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees,
| sell their vision to journalists and potential customers,
| etc._
|
| As cynical and hollow as it sounds, pretty sure this advice
| is consistent with what I have heard in multiple videos and
| blogs from YC.
|
| See also: "create investor fomo", https://html.duckduckgo.c
| om/html/search?q=create%20fomo%20in...
| moneywoes wrote:
| What do you find is the "best way to sell"?
| jedberg wrote:
| Have an answer to every objection. First figure out all
| the ways you would object and make sure you have an
| answer, then note down any objections you don't have an
| answer to during your process and make sure you have a
| good answer next time.
|
| And if you're selling a product, make sure you know your
| competitors well because a lot of objections will be in
| the form of "but competitor X does this, how do you solve
| that problem?" and "what do you do that X doesn't do?".
| So you better know X really well because the person
| you're talking to already does and will know if you're
| making stuff up.
| altdataseller wrote:
| Is Gitlab 100% open source?
| mr_tristan wrote:
| It's really "open core", but they use one code base, so
| commercial-licensed code is "available" but not under an open
| source license.
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/strategic-
| market...
|
| NOTE: I'm not associated with GitLab at all I just found the
| topic interesting. I don't know of many other projects that
| actually do things this way, with all the commercial licensed
| code mixed in with the open source code.
|
| This was kind of an interesting speech I found searching
| around: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-
| open-sourc...
| pankajdoharey wrote:
| Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great,
| i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Github is a website while Gitlab is software.
| robinhood wrote:
| Github is actually a web application, like Gitlab.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Can you download Github and host a private Github
| instance? No? Then its web-only. Like Google Docs is web-
| only, while MS Word is offline.
|
| Gitlab is hostable software. You can buy and host Gitlab
| on your own servers, in private. That makes it a
| fundamentally different market than Github.
| Kranar wrote:
| >Can you download Github and host a private Github
| instance?
|
| Yes, that's what Github Enterprise Server is:
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-
| server@3.2/admin/overv...
| bityard wrote:
| Gitlab is both actually
| shaan7 wrote:
| I work for two clients (one of them is a huge German
| company) as a consultant who are both using GitLab simply
| because they can host it on their infrastructure. Makes it
| easier for them to satisfy internal security policies I
| guess.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| What else would they use?
| rnicholus wrote:
| Gitlab always felt like a set of checkboxes to appease non-
| technical managers. In my experience, most features are
| half-baked. Even the code review/MR experience is
| frustrating compared to GitHub. The UX for security scans
| is _really_ rough.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| GitLab CI is world-class.
| 210Donegal wrote:
| What about the UX for security scans is rough?
| nitrogen wrote:
| GitLab's integrated CI came before GitHub actions and was
| super helpful.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| GitHub is Microsoft now.
|
| Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a
| good enough use case.
| robinhood wrote:
| Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the
| world today. What else do they need to do to gain some
| kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the
| acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most
| of their programming language. Github is free for open
| source org and there are no limits to the CI usage.
|
| Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point.
| They are in the position of needing to generate as much
| revenue as possible to satisfy their investors. Github is
| not in this position anymore.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Largest open source organization based on what metrics ?
| They havent open up any of their bread making products.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| It is not. They're better than _most_ - and I know that 's
| not a high bar, but they clear it by a wide margin.
| Nonetheless, their software is better described as "open
| core".
| pestaa wrote:
| RedHat is not 100% open source either (although the
| differences are important).
| fredros wrote:
| I'd say it's 99% open source. Do you have any significant
| example of non open source red hat software ?
| killerstorm wrote:
| > My thought at the time was that no open source company had
| ever been super successful except RedHat
|
| Sun bought MySQL for 1 billion USD in 2008, does that not count
| as successful?
|
| Also, MongoDB, Elastic and many many others...
| ZetaZero wrote:
| MongoDB and Elastic are successful because they are locking
| features behind a paid license. Does that make it a
| successful open source company?
| codetrotter wrote:
| GitLab has features in the Enterprise edition that aren't
| in the Community edition don't they?
| djbusby wrote:
| Correct.
| strzibny wrote:
| But GitLab is the same concept...
| jedberg wrote:
| I meant there were no successful public companies based on
| open source except RedHat in 2015.
| mindwok wrote:
| I've used Gitlab constantly for many years, and they stand out to
| me as a company that delivers new features at an astounding pace
| and with a relatively high level of polish. I really don't know
| how they do it. Congrats to the Gitlab team, your success is well
| deserved!
| marsven_422 wrote:
| They need a lower price point for premium, all I want is enforced
| reviews of merge request. But $19 _12_ 15 is to much for that
| feature.
| debacle wrote:
| A paid user + big fan of gitlab. They exist in a strange valley
| between github and Atlassian where usability has remained high
| while also being featureful.
|
| Their kanban is 10% more functional than Trello, which is all our
| small team really needs, they give you everything and they don't
| nickel and dime you.
|
| The only feature I would like to see improved is their PR
| process. Seems a bit buggy with remotely large changesets, and
| the digest for the PR should provide a bit more context to
| reviewees.
| marceloabsousa wrote:
| We've been building a new code review tool for the PR/MR
| process. Check it out at https://reviewpad.com.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| The only issue I had with GL is that they don't show the entire
| diff if the changes/files are very large.
|
| They may have fixed this since last year, but it was super,
| super annoying to me at the time.
| debacle wrote:
| You can "expand" the diff, but sometimes that breaks the UI,
| makes it unable to add comments, etc. That's probably the
| reason they don't show large changesets by default.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| Their search functionality is also... non functioning.
| Github's search is dramatically more powerful.
| necovek wrote:
| Nope, they still arbitrarily decide to "fold" big changes
| (file with a large diff), causing me to miss entire files
| when reviewing on occasion.
|
| In all honesty, their pull request pages need a lot of UX
| work: too much stuff going on on the overview pages, jumping
| to unresolved threads does not work when they are in previous
| commits...
|
| There's also that merge train confusion where merge trains
| get "cancelled" without an obvious explanation ("this was
| cancelled because it is included in a new one" would do). In
| a sense, I'd say that their UX is pretty bad, but the API is
| not much better either (you can't fetch pipeline log files
| with individual script timings that you see floating on the
| right in the web UI). If anything, all of this only goes to
| show that you don't need to be perfect to be good!
|
| But I applaud the effort, mission and dedication they put up,
| and especially their open core nature.
|
| Congrats on the IPO and keep pushing forward.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Yes! Gitlab's offerings are great, and our team doesn't even
| scratch the surface of what's possible with its feature set.
|
| That said, MRs with over 1000 lines of changes are painful
| sometimes impossible to review. Even small MRs feel clunky, due
| to how many panels there are (yes, I know they're collapsible).
| Because MRs are one of our most used features, it sometimes
| makes me consider switching to GitHub for their much nicer PR
| UX/UI.
| Gepsens wrote:
| I prefer to use Intellij now for reviews. How can people
| review any kind of code in that PR web UI ? I mean I used to
| do it but not anymore
| marceloabsousa wrote:
| Would be very curious about your thoughts on Reviewpad
| (https://reviewpad.com). The interactions you have on the
| IDE are very different than a tool that was specifically
| made for code reviews.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Do you review code in the code _editor_ , the git _diff_ ,
| or some specialized full-PR/MR diff with integration with
| online comments and discussions?
|
| https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40217494/how-to-
| review-a... says IntelliJ has GitHub-only specialized PR
| review/commenting.
| dhritzkiv wrote:
| Yeah, I should really quit struggling with Gitlab's.
|
| For really large MRs, I use Tower + Kaleidoscope to view
| the changes. But then I can't easily leave a comment on a
| line of code (a big part of the review process)
| FabioFleitas wrote:
| Gitlab's IPO would also mark the first ever 100% distributed
| company to IPO. Wild!
| pixelmonkey wrote:
| Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) was pretty much a fully distributed team
| upon IPO. They had offices, but they were more like "coworking
| cafes", where folks who happened to be in the same geographic
| area would meet up, or have social celebrations. At least,
| that's my understanding, tracking the company since its early
| days. On a recent podcast, Shay Banon described it as a fully
| distributed team of 2,000+ folks.[1] They IPO'ed in 2018.[2]
|
| [1]: https://pca.st/kvgw4iz9
|
| [2]: https://twitter.com/kimchy/status/1048595935088009216
| heytherewhat wrote:
| > They had offices
|
| And Gitlab doesn't.
| bdcravens wrote:
| What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github
| copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it
| first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.
| gbear605 wrote:
| And Github is a copy of Sourceforge, which is inevitably a copy
| of someone else.
|
| Source code hosting as a business isn't new, it just needs to
| be executed well.
| dQw4w9WgXcQ wrote:
| Another big win for Joe Montana, but this time via Liquid 2
| Ventures.
| literallyWTF wrote:
| Oh geez. This most likely means the frequency of their updates
| will get even faster and their somewhat dubious quality will
| plummet.
|
| Who knows, maybe I'll be wrong and their auto devops pipelines
| might actually get rid of kubernetes namespaces for branches that
| don't exist! :0
| smartbit wrote:
| Dmitriy Zaporozhets is explicit mentioned in the blog and on the
| photo. The S1 doesn't mention him
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573867. Anyone know why
| Dmitriy owns less than 5% of the outstanding shares of the Class
| A or Class B common stock?
| eganist wrote:
| Dilution plus private stock sale or unequal share provisioning
| among founders? Probably a handful of things, though not sure
| if it has any bearing on Gitlab's success.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Ever since I found their company handbook online, I have been in
| love with their process/culture and wanted to work for them. But
| I don't write Ruby and they don't seem to need a lot of
| DevOps/SysEng/SREs.
| jandeboevrie wrote:
| I worked with Sytse (as Sid used to be called) back in 2011/2012
| in The Hague when he consulted at Digidentity, with Marin. Great
| guy back then, used to run around in a lab coat, the GitLAB guy.
| Wonderful to see what Gitlab has become, well done!
| mcv wrote:
| > Sytse (as Sid used to be called)
|
| That explains a lot. I thought Sid was an unusual name for
| someone with that surname. But it makes business sense to use
| something more internationally pronounceable.
| jandeboevrie wrote:
| Fun fact on Dutch names, his wife Karen has the same
| Sijbrandij, but not due to marriage, but due to them being
| distant cousins, who found one another on the search function
| of an early chat client, like ICQ, he once told us. So she
| could actually call herself Karen Sijbrandij-Sijbrandij.
| alangibson wrote:
| Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B
| valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high
| valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one
| seems almost reasonable.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few others would pay 10B+ to own
| those relationships and control of the future of the product
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| If they were paying more than an IPO value they probably
| would buy already ...
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Gitlab doesn't want to sell
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| GitLab Just (partially) sold.
|
| However: If they don't want to (fully) sell basing the
| price on a value someone else might eventually pay for a
| (full) acquisition doesn't make much sense. (Unless you
| assume they revise the decision, but then the argument
| about not selling is moot again)
| gitfan86 wrote:
| Look at Facebook. Zuck has no interest in giving up full
| control to someone else, but he does want to be a public
| company.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Yes, since FB is a money printing machine producing lots
| of revenue which is some argument forms one market value
| for parts of a company.
|
| The argument Here was "ORCL, MSFT, SalesForce and a few
| others would pay 10B+" but those would pay those
| valuations only for full control.
|
| FB's market cap is around 900B$. Gaining full control
| over FB would be valued a lot more.
| czbond wrote:
| Came to look for the same. I haven't found current or future
| projections on revenue to hang something on.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitHub in 2018.
|
| GitLab being ~$10B 4 year later seems like similar ballbark.
| There is always the possibility of acquisition in the future.
|
| (EDIT: had names reversed)
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely makes
| me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion.
|
| Much as I personally prefer GitLab, GitHub had a bigger
| customer base back then than GitLab has now. GitLab may be
| gaining market share, but it's mostly eating Atlassian's
| portion of the market and not GitHub's. It's plausible GitHub
| undervalued themself in the sale to Microsoft of course, so a
| careful look at the numbers is required to evaluate the
| valuation, but the value comparison isn't a great sign to me.
|
| Separately of course, GitLab might be in line with the
| valuation of companies on the stock market in general which
| have ballooned heavily in recent years. Whether that's a
| bubble or permanent inflation in stock prices then becomes
| the relevant question to answer, I suppose.
| nemothekid wrote:
| > _Microsoft only paying 7.5 billion for GitHub definitely
| makes me less confident that GitLab is worth 10 billion._
|
| It's worth considering that between 2018 and now, tech
| valuations have _exploded_. MSFT is up 300%. QQQ is up
| 100%. I doubt GitHub is valued anywhere near 7.5B today.
| thefreeman wrote:
| how many users did github have at the time vs gitlab now?
| dewey wrote:
| > Microsoft paid $7.5 billion for GitLab in 2018.
|
| That's a bit of an alternate timeline.
| [deleted]
| lmeyerov wrote:
| As with GitHub, the bigger value is owning shift left
| disruptions for enterprise and cloud sw+he services: security
| scanning, backups, prod server hosting, ... .
|
| It is hard to compete with AWS, and a lot easier if you own the
| UI+APIs for how software teams do CI+CD: you become a default
| preferred vendor for all IaaS/PaaS add-ins, and can proactively
| recommend and even trial them well before any competitor. IBM,
| Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, Alibaba, etc could all win big --
| imagine if IBM bought GitLab instead of RedHat to fix their
| data center strategy.
| isthis129283 wrote:
| First 6 months of this year Gitlab took in $108M in revenue,
| and had $177M in expenses. Would you pay $10B to own a company
| that loses $10M/month, with the hopes they will continue to
| increase revenue in the future and become profitable?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| In the 6 months before their IPO - Square had net revenue of
| $200 million and expenses of $260 million, also losing
| $10M/month. Would you have paid $3 billion in 2015 to own
| that business?
|
| If you had you would've had a 30x return today... (current
| market cap is ~$112 billion).
| user5994461 wrote:
| The large majority of the 30x return was over the past 2
| years with the pandemic, which is not going to happen for
| Gitlab.
|
| God forbids if you bought square long ago and didn't hold
| long enough, they had multiple years of ups and downs.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=square+share
| alangibson wrote:
| Personally I'd buy an aircraft carrier if I had $10B.
| Nevertheless, there are plenty of people willing to put it in
| Gitlab or they wouldn't IPO. A better question might have
| been: what's the bull argument for Gitlab?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| The usage argument is: buy your own "self-hosted" cloud
| offering, deployed over any combination of
| AWS/Azure/GCP/onprem that you like.
|
| The bull argument probably looks something like: replace
| Microsoft Office 365 / Azure with an integrated "self-
| hosted" solution, easily deployed to any commoditized
| compute...handled by GitLab for paying customers,
| assurances of "escape hatch" to DIY open-source when you
| stop paying.
| airstrike wrote:
| Define "justified". For most purposes, the market looks at
| valuation on a relative basis1.
|
| Their S-1 says GitLab generated revenues of $152 million in FY
| 2021 (ending Jan 31), up 87% from the year before2. For the
| sake of argument, let's assume their growth rate slows down
| "slightly" to 50%. That's ~$230 million projected for FY 2022
|
| At $10 billion, that implies a forward revenue multiple of
| ~43.5x, which does seem high--but it's not necessarily
| "unjustified". I haven't read the S-1 and the market reaction
| to the IPO has been quite positive so far. You'd need to know
| the business and the market well to make your own individual
| assessment of why it commands this premium multiple. Customers,
| TAM, growth, churn, competition, etc.
|
| ----------
|
| 1. For better or worse, relative valuation is viewed as "more
| defensible". If you're wrong, you can simply say, "well, that's
| how the market was pricing it at the time" whereas if you are
| wrong with your intrinsic valuation model (like a DCF), you
| have no one to blame.
|
| 2.
| https://www.bamsec.com/filing/162828021018818/1?cik=1653482&...
| user5994461 wrote:
| How much of that revenue growth was driven by Gitlab more
| than quadrupling their price in the last two years? ($4 to
| $19 a month).
|
| They can't pull that trick again.
| buryat wrote:
| they have massive losses
|
| https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001653482/000162828...
| maxpert wrote:
| Congratulations to the team. It's rewarding to make it through,
| but don't make the product shittier just because you are big now.
| atonse wrote:
| "Gitlab CEO here, getting rich and feeling proud" [1] ;-) -
| congrats to the Sid, Dmitriy, and the rest of the Gitlab team.
| Always appreciated your presence on HN.
|
| We've been GitLab customers for 2-3 years now (what was
| attractive was having "everything in one SaaS subscription") and
| it's worked out quite well.
|
| There's always papercuts for sure and the product could always
| use more polish, but overall it has been nice to have most of our
| dev processes under one umbrella.
|
| Now when is Hashicorp going public? I've got my wallet ready for
| that one.
|
| [1]
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| nabakin wrote:
| When I click on your link to find the quote, it doesn't show
| up. Strange. Or are you playing off of the joke?
| atonse wrote:
| That's strange.
|
| Try looking for "gitlab CEO here" (with quotes) at the bottom
| search on HN? (and pick Comments. they won't show up in
| stories.)
| elpakal wrote:
| Congrats to the team and I'm very thankful that there are
| alternatives to GitHub out there. Not that I don't like GitHub (I
| do) or use GitHub (every day), but lately it seems like they are
| sherlocking a whole lot of ideas from the OSS "marketplace" into
| their main product. That kind of irks me.
|
| If GitLab were able to add something like GitHub Actions into
| their platform I would leave GH in a second.
| dadrian wrote:
| GitLab CI is basically GitHub Actions, except easier to use.
| elpakal wrote:
| yea I'm not talking about CI, mostly _all the other things_
| Actions can do right now like label events, comment events,
| all the events etc.
| ericpauley wrote:
| GitLab has a very mature CI/CD framework that in many ways
| outshines Actions[1]. I use it regularly and definitely
| recommend it.
|
| [1] https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/ci-
| mi...
| snypox wrote:
| Isn't GitLabs whole premise is the CI/CD?
| gadders wrote:
| For anyone else that needs it:
|
| The phenomenon of Apple releasing a feature that supplants or
| obviates third-party software is so well known that being
| Sherlocked has become an accepted term used within the Mac and
| iOS developer community.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these
| sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation
| like? Are they currently able to become profitable without
| drastically changing the deal with users?
| megous wrote:
| Well they're currently trying to test that hypothesis via A/B
| tests:
|
| https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keep...
| rossmohax wrote:
| They had $192M losses in 2021 and $152M revenue. So no, not
| even remotely profitable, but it is common: Atlassian, Jira,
| Datadog, PagerDuty, Snowflake, CloudFlare, Fastly all IPOed and
| succeeded on the market without being profitable even once.
| scottydelta wrote:
| Gitlab is the only easy, reliable, and free docker registry
| provider and I have been using them since more than a year. Happy
| to see them succeed.
| lnxg33k1 wrote:
| I guess after GitHub and gitlab i will have to find an
| alternative, so long and thanks for all the fish, I'm not really
| sure why we need to pursue growth at all cost, a perpetual hunt
| for currency on daily basis, of a number we will never be able to
| spend
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| Why?
| jypepin wrote:
| I used to work at Uber's Amsterdam office at a time where the
| remote nature of the office (from SF HQ) was a struggle for some
| teams because of strong dependencies on teams located at SF HQ.
|
| Sid came to the office and talked to us about some strategies
| Gitlab used for remote work, timezone differences etc.
|
| Not only the talk was very helpful, Sid was an incredibly clear
| communicator, calm and humble. He really seemed to be a great
| leader and someone it must be nice working with.
| Copenjin wrote:
| For those who want to know more about Gitlab and its all remote
| approach (a lot of posts):
| https://about.gitlab.com/blog/tags.html#remote-work
|
| And their handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/
| e40 wrote:
| We used this as a template the year before the pandemic to
| get our mostly remote teams working well. Once the pandemic
| hit, there were few issues we had to address.
|
| I very much appreciate them making that public.
| Copenjin wrote:
| Yep, that wiki is amazing.
| alohaandmahalo wrote:
| Darren here from GitLab -- warms my heart to hear that
| our remote guides are being used and making
| lives/companies better. Thank you!
| wyldfire wrote:
| I recently wanted to try adding some diagrams to a markdown-
| formatted README file in a Github Enterprise repo. I saw a few
| solutions but they all seemed to require me to roll some kind of
| service or automation to generate a raster image of the diagram
| and reference that from the markdown. There's an outstanding
| feature request for Github to integrate this kind of thing in
| their markdown rendering. But it's been languishing for years. Of
| course, Gitlab has had it for a while.
|
| If Github's not careful, Gitlab will eat their lunch.
|
| Gitlab should be careful not to make their product into "The
| Homer" [1], though.
|
| [1] https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/The_Homer
| woodruffw wrote:
| I agree with the general thrust of your comment (and I've been
| happy to see that GitHub's feature development pick up over the
| past few years), but I don't know if Markdown is the best
| example: I've lost track of how many times I or someone else I
| work with has written some Markdown, only to discover that it's
| a GH or GL extension and that our deployed documentation (or
| package index pages) don't render our hard work correctly.
| vultour wrote:
| GitLab has already turned into "The Homer". It has hundreds
| (thousands?) of features, but if you stray away from the core
| git functionality you'll very quickly realise they're pretty
| bad.
|
| I've always seen GitLab as a useful tool for smaller companies
| where you can use it to replace several other applications
| (e.g. JIRA, Jenkins, or wiki), but if your company already has
| those established it all becomes somewhat useless.
| exhaze wrote:
| Have you read the GitLab S-1? They have great retention with
| larger companies. Can you substantiate any of your claims?
| (FYI I have no horse in this race, I evaluated GH vs GL
| recently and decided to stay on GH for now)
| adduc wrote:
| From their S-1:
|
| > We do not have an adequate history with our subscription
| or pricing models to accurately predict the long-term rate
| of customer subscription renewals or adoption, or the
| impact these renewals and adoption will have on our
| revenues or operating results.
|
| For context, GitLab recently axed their lowest priced plan
| and grandfathered in existing users at cheaper rates for
| the next year. Their retention rate may drop once discounts
| run out and the new pricing kicks in.
|
| As to the parent's comment about "The Homer" and non-core
| features being bad, I'd point to their CI autoscaling
| solution as an example of being underdeveloped, over-
| marketed, and suffering from technical debt. Their
| autoscaler uses docker machine behind-the-scenes, which
| hooks into various cloud providers to abstract away the act
| of spinning up new VMs. It works reasonably well, but
| Docker has archived the repository and no longer supports
| the software. GitLab forked the repository and maintains it
| for critical fixes, but is not willing to develop or accept
| new features. It has been known to break against new
| versions of Docker, does not handle concurrency very well
| in new environments, and does not allow [1] executing
| multiple concurrent jobs within spun up VMs, despite
| marketing that it can [2].
|
| While the autoscaler does work, it's limitations and quirks
| reduces it's utility and cost-savings significantly within
| smaller organizations. The technical debt leaves me
| doubting any improvements will come within the next few
| years as they try to architect a new solution to replace
| the existing one.
|
| I have no idea how GitLab compares in other areas, but
| within CI autoscaling it seems they're stuck with a cliff
| to climb down before they can move forward again.
|
| [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
| runner/-/issues/2787#no...
|
| [2]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/23/autoscale-ci-
| runner...
| rossmohax wrote:
| CI is moving in Kubernetes everywhere I know. Builtin
| kubernetes pod autoscaler can add capacity based on job
| queue length metric, so no need for docker machine
| anymore.
| the-dude wrote:
| I think it is fair to say Gitlab is already eating Github's
| lunch. For some time.
| brightball wrote:
| Is it?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Are they? What's the Gitlab market share?
|
| Also, it sounds to me like Github is leaving the old lunch of
| "Git hosting + issue tracking" on the table, and moving on to
| being a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service
| collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in. So
| even if Gitlab picks up some single-digit-percentage market
| share, that's not what Github cares about anyway.
| what_is_orcas wrote:
| > a kind of web-based all-in-one full-service
| collaboration/dev platform with a social network built in.
|
| Why would I want a social network built into my version
| control & ci/cd pipeline (I assume you're referring to the
| "stars" feature, and not about issue reporting).
|
| Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon, but I'm sort of sick of
| everything becoming a social network. I neither have nor do
| I want internet clout, and all social networks feel like
| they're trying to force me into "keeping up with the
| Jones'" in whatever way they're relevant.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Github has been a social network for years. You can
| follow users and "star" repositories.
|
| It has its merits for search and discovery.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| In OpenSource space there is a small value: If I get a
| contribution from a stranger and I see they are respected
| contributor to trustworthy other organisations I can
| derive some trust from that. (Doesn't mean handing out
| access and blindly merging, but helps to judge)
|
| Also for people looking for jobs it can be a tool for
| self promotion.
| pjot wrote:
| Especially considering the coupling of GitHub with vscode
| airstrike wrote:
| Surprised they didn't go for the "GIT" ticker
| dgudkov wrote:
| Dmitriy Zaporozhets (co-founder) was Gitlab's CTO until 2018 and
| now his LinkedIn profile says "Engineering fellow at Gitlab".
| What happened to him?
| coolhand1 wrote:
| It's pretty incredible what Gitlab has been able to accomplish
| considering the market space they're in.
| m0zg wrote:
| Kudos to GitLab for boldly and successfully going where (almost)
| no company has gone before - to having a worldwide, distributed
| workforce. Truly the way of the future, and (IMO) better quality
| of life for employees once they get used to working remote and
| stop fighting it. I've been working primarily remote for the past
| 3 years, and my QOL has never been better. No commute, working
| hours can be when I feel productive (which tends to be in the
| evening), and if I'm tired nobody will look at me funny if I take
| a nap, except maybe my cat.
|
| Most importantly, this forces folks into asynchronous and written
| communication, which both makes my work less interrupt driven,
| and reduces reliance on institutional knowledge. I think we're
| yet to fully realize the benefits of this brave new world. And
| yes, I'm aware that some folks need water cooler conversations. I
| don't though.
|
| Sid, if you're reading this, do please write a book on how you
| did it, so others could replicate your success in terms of
| geographic distribution. Knowing the legal / accounting / tax
| pitfalls, and how to avoid getting screwed when hiring abroad
| would be pretty invaluable to others.
| sdflhasjd wrote:
| I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their
| hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing
| so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option.
|
| It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to
| commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing
| doesn't seem to make sense.
| gorkish wrote:
| The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain
| types of companies. For our developers who really do most
| everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses
| for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a
| couple of times a month? Hell naw.
|
| Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed
| some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
| rossmohax wrote:
| Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you
| usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll
| give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we
| managed to get a license for all users who ever need to
| login, but for the price of number of core active users.
| xtracto wrote:
| Same thing happened to me at a previous company: I had just
| migrated from Github to Gitlab and was planning on getting on
| the paid plan, when they suddenly did the price bump. Worse of
| all is that it is not possible to pay monthly (Github allows
| this). So we got back to Github.
| mooreds wrote:
| I haven't used gitlab much, but I was shocked to hear GitHub's
| CTO (at the time of the interview, he has moved on since) state
| that GitHub didn't consider them a competitor.
|
| "I do think that people still, to this day, think of GitLab as
| one of our main competitors, and I never have ever saw GitLab as
| a competitor."
|
| https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud...
|
| Anyone have thoughts on that? Or pointers to more reading?
| mullingitover wrote:
| Github should see them as competitors, because Gitlab has
| definitely taken business from them.
|
| Back in 2014 I started at a company that was still using a
| hand-rolled git server. They tried out Github enterprise but
| were unsatisfied with GH's lack of LDAP integration, so they
| were going to continue to frankenstein their in-house git
| server. I pitched them Gitlab instead, which did pretty much
| everything GH enterprise was doing, _plus_ LDAP integration,
| _plus_ was a fraction of the price. They were sold, I migrated
| the company to Gitlab, and continued to be impressed as Gitlab
| ran laps around Github on features.
| reducesuffering wrote:
| As Peter Thiel repeatedly puts in Zero to One:
|
| Monopolists love to talk about have they have competitors and
| act like they're in competition.
|
| Competitors love to downplay that they have any competitors at
| all and try to upsell their business like they're monopolists.
| erik_landerholm wrote:
| While anecdotal, we see a lot of development environments for a
| lot of companies and the amount using github vs gitlab is like
| 5 or 6x to 1. So, in that sense I get what the CTO of github is
| saying.
| pid-1 wrote:
| GitHub has stronger 'social' features and it's better for
| people who want to connect to other devs or build portfolios.
|
| GitLab is years ahead of GitHub for certain stuff (e.g. CI/CD)
| and IMO it has a better commercial offering for business.
|
| I use GitHub as my portfolio profile for free and GitLab in my
| $JOB.
|
| That's my opinion tho, I'm just a person who uses both.
| pjot wrote:
| In an interview I had with GL the interviewer mentioned
| "people use GH for open source work, and GL for closed".
| la_fayette wrote:
| Thats somehow funny, as GH is closed source and GL is open
| source...
| 10000truths wrote:
| Makes perfect sense to me. Because GL is open source, it
| can be easily self hosted, which is great for data
| residency compliance, or specialized security needs.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab
| database by doing something unsupported or because of a
| bug, good luck with that.
|
| Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database
| and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to
| migrate to their cloud offering.
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for
| backups. Literally just run a single command to create a
| backup on a network share.
|
| Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system
| administration.
| mritzmann wrote:
| Self hosting GitLab = Run 1 single Docker Container. Very
| easy.
| polskibus wrote:
| It's mostly a matter of backups. Only pick self hosted if
| you can back it up reliably every night.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Remember that GitHub is not MS's enterprise product in this
| space. When they acquired GH everyone waited for "the merge"
| and I think they've been really smart to (at least) appear to
| be hands off. I can happily use GH for my stuff while cursing
| Azure DevOps for work without going crazy.
| whymarrh wrote:
| Yeah they're similar feature-wise but the communities that
| exists on GitHub vs. GitLab aren't remotely comparable.
| vultour wrote:
| GitHub's CI pipelines are behind GitLab? My lord, here I was
| thinking about moving to GitHub Enterprise when our
| subscription expires because everything in GitLab feels like
| an unfinished weekend project. Seems like nobody can get
| anywhere near the functionality of Jenkins.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Seriously, they're miles behind. It doesn't even really
| support Kubernetes, you have to have long running 'runner'
| servers ala Jenkins and you need to have all your build
| tools installed on those. It's miserable, fragile and I've
| dearly, dearly missed gitlab CI the last few times I've had
| to go anywhere near actions.
| easton wrote:
| It's probably because Actions is a fork of Azure
| Pipelines, which was originally designed to coordinate
| runners on Windows (where containers aren't nearly as
| flexible or compatible as they are on Linux). Microsoft
| came up with some fancy internal magic to have hot pools
| of ephemeral VMs ready to assign in seconds, which nobody
| outside can really replicate (I don't think), and then
| everyone sits in sadness while they try to debug why
| their tests run fine on "runner-1" but not on "runner-2".
| pid-1 wrote:
| I agree GitLab's CI has many edge cases. More importantly,
| it feels like they stopped making it better to focus on
| other stuff.
|
| That said, GH actions is really new and full of imitations
| / weird stuff as well. I still think GL offers more bang
| for the buck in 2021.
|
| Another option is using something external like Drone CI,
| Circle CI, etc... Some of those look nice, but I've never
| tested myself.
| mooreds wrote:
| > Seems like nobody can get anywhere near the functionality
| of Jenkins.
|
| I've heard Jenkins is a nightmare to administer (not sure
| about the new versions). Seems like an opportunity: the
| power of Jenkins with modern sensibility.
| specialist wrote:
| Jenkins (and the like) are build script obfuscation
| frameworks.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to spend
| months customising it with groovy and it became overly
| specific to your team/dept. The servers themselves are
| quite simple (single .jar, etc). These days we have
| containers, and it's made CI a much better thing.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| I agree with this. The quality of your Jenkins experience
| will be pretty much inversely proportional to how much
| groovy script is in your Jenkinsfiles.
|
| Every new permutation of parameters is a new chance for
| something to go wrong, and there's basically no sane way
| to unit test or validate any of your "helper" functions,
| so they're all write-once-change-never.
|
| Which is not necessarily a problem inherent in Jenkins--
| Jenkins just gives you more than enough rope to hang
| yourself. GitLab CI can get silly too, but culturally it
| inherits from the much simpler Travis model, where you're
| basically expected to just be wrapping some other build
| tool (eg, tox from the Python world) rather than rolling
| the whole thing yourself.
| outworlder wrote:
| Groovy is arguably the wrong language choice, even if it
| worked fine in other aspects. The string handling
| situation alone is crazy, which is compounded if you are
| using it with bash (which has its own crazy ideas about
| string escaping). That's a not too uncommon scenario.
|
| You end up with this:
|
| https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e
| 412...
| outworlder wrote:
| > Jenkins is a nightmare because everyone decided to
| spend months customising it with groovy and it became
| overly specific to your team/dept
|
| Yes. One thousand times this.
|
| If you are running simple scripts it's fine. If you are
| using the declarative pipeline, it's fine. The moment you
| start adding Groovy you'll be down a path that is filled
| with sadness and anger. Mind you, even the folks behind
| Jenkins will advise you not to use any complex Groovy
| scripts(including for performance reasons - you can
| easily overwork the jenkins master).
|
| I've been focusing on Concourse because it forces the
| usage of containers for everything. You don't have to
| care about what's installed in the worker node, you just
| use a container that has the stuff you want. Simple
| inputs and outputs.
|
| You _can_ do the same sort of thing with Jenkins (but be
| aware of all the bugs still open regarding containers).
| But Jenkins doesn't force you to do anything, nor it
| gives you an easy and out of the box solution to string
| containers together. Left unchecked, you have your
| reproducible builds running in completely unreproduceable
| magical build machines - that noone really understands
| how it all works.
|
| Did a migration of a few hundreds of pipelines from one
| server to another and it exposed a lot of dependencies we
| didn't know we had. Plugins, jars, packages installed in
| build machines, you name it.
|
| If you must use Jenkins, please try to avoid Groovy to
| the max, write anything that's non-trivial as an
| executable (even if it is a bash script) and call it from
| the main pipeline. Use containers if you can to avoid
| build machine dependencies. Try to use declarative
| pipelines too unless your jobs are very simple, and avoid
| the 'script' blocks. Do not use the scripting pipeline to
| avoid inviting groovy to your home.
|
| You can thank me in a couple of years.
| kerblang wrote:
| Just to contradict the complaining about groovy scripts:
| I reduced something like 100 jobs to 2 using groovy in
| jenkins, and it has been a godsend. I'm not having any
| problems with it.
|
| Mind you, the Groovy stuff was implemented as an
| afterthought, and if you aren't handy with Groovy (I am)
| it can be challenging to learn. But compared to the
| horrible GUI-driven alternative, it was a no-brainer in
| the end.
|
| Really, the more you're doing CI, the more you want
| scripts - doesn't have to be Groovy. I'd honestly be
| perfectly fine just doing things with a bash shell on a
| vanilla linux install. I only use Jenkins because my team
| insists on it, for what? So we can put a web UI in front
| of CI. I'd even tend to agree that with supply-chain
| attacks being what they are, and jenkins being a never-
| ending fountain of security patches, putting a web UI in
| front of CI isn't worth it.
|
| But at least the groovy part makes life bearable.
| wmfiv wrote:
| You're looking for TeamCity,
| https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/.
| secondaryacct wrote:
| And jenkins is centuries behind Teamcity.
|
| My company extracted us from github+teamcity paradise to
| force fit us to gitlab, it's not going well. Try both and
| for real, build a real project pipeline and see if that
| works for your dev before moving to either.
| rossmohax wrote:
| I never worked with Teamcity, but created a fairly
| complicated Gitlab CI pipelines. What do you miss in
| Gitlab CI?
| skofgar wrote:
| And here I am planning on replacing Jenkins with GitLab
| CI.. do you really think Jenkins is better? Do you have any
| examples or thoughts you can share?
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Your plan is solid (source: building ci stuff for >10
| years). I wouldn't really suggest much else, although
| argo is getting pretty good if you're deploying to k8s,
| I'd still keep gitlab around for creating your images.
| orf wrote:
| We did a talk on it, happy to answer any questions. It's
| definitely worth it.
|
| A lot of our Jenkins issues came down to "we are not very
| good at managing Jenkins", but even if we where the
| massive jump in productivity, flexibility and team
| independence we saw after rolling it out makes me believe
| it's just better.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=k83hTlb9pMc
| swozey wrote:
| Github makes you do a ton of goofy side work to get simple
| things you'll expect in Gitlab/etc to work. Want to check
| out multiple repos? You'll need someone with org admin to
| create a service account and to manually pull each repo in
| a CI step with that service accounts token. This means tons
| of people are using their own PATs to get around "who is
| the github org admin?" sort of stuff.
|
| I could go on and on, Github Actions are horrid compared to
| Gitlab. I wish, wish wish I could go back but I don't have
| that power here. Github doesn't have scoped issues like
| Gitlab, the issue board is so lacking, "projects" is stale
| and featureless so many things.
|
| But I AM the one who deals with the aftermath. I've spent
| days fixing one simple github action and I have plenty I
| don't even wind up deploying they're so problematic.
| rossmohax wrote:
| No idea why you've been downvoted. Gitlab CI is
| lightyears ahead of Github Actions, it's a fact.
| swozey wrote:
| I came the opposite direction from most I think, I
| started with Gitlab and k8s back in 2015 and I just wound
| up in a Github Codepipeline workflow. Unique experience.
| reayn wrote:
| I think the CTO's reasoning comes from that while GitLab is
| competitive in terms of usage and features (actually offering a
| more complete CI experience imo), it's influence is still
| relatively miniscule in comparison to GitHub.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if you tried asking random people in
| public or in a university whether they know GitHub or GitLab
| and came to the conclusion that GitLab basically does not exist
| for many people.
|
| Especially for newer programmers, the vast majority
| tutorials/educational courses and whatnot probably don't even
| mention any alternatives to GitHub, much less an explicit
| reference to GitLab.
|
| I say we just give it time, GitLab as a company seems like a
| way more inviting environment to me and if they keep up the
| good work GitHub may have to start acknowledging them more.
| paxys wrote:
| They are similar products but target different market segments.
| Github wants public open-source projects, Gitlab wants large
| enterprises.
| 41209 wrote:
| In the same way the Nintendo Switch and Xbox Series X aren't
| competitors.
|
| Many hard core gamers will have both. My Switch is for Smash
| Bros and the Advance Wars reboot. Advance Wars was one of my
| favorite games as a kid, and I'll pay 300$ for a machine just
| to play it.
|
| The Series X also plays games, but it's a completely different
| experience. No one expects Switch quirkiness on an Xbox, and no
| one expects 4K gaming on a Switch.
|
| GitHub is for your public portfolio. Gitlab is for getting
| stuff done once your GitHub portfolio lands you a decent job.
|
| GitHub is synonymous with programmer portfolio, but it's CI/CD
| system is rather primitive.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Actions are close If not better than Gitlab's CI. I moved
| from Gitlab to GitHub Actions because they offer OSX runners
| too, game changer.
| 41209 wrote:
| Are you using enterprise Gitlab?
|
| I don't think Gitlab is a serious player outside of
| enterprise clients. But that's where the money is.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| This is also where MS pushes Azure DevOps because it is
| inline with their subscription approach for Enterprise
| Office, Project Management and DevOps. It is really easy
| for a company that already pays for Office 365 to add on
| Azure DevOps. It's a lot less easy for the teams to adopt
| it, but we all know you sell to the front office, not the
| back.
| 41209 wrote:
| Azure assumes you aren't already using AWS.
|
| You can only sell so much to the front office, if it's
| significantly harder to get things working on Azure, new
| features are going to ship later if they do at all.
| maineldc wrote:
| I think the grandparent is referring to Azure DevOps
| which is a Git / Issues product like Github and Gitlab,
| not Azure Cloud. Azure DevOps is "fine" though I feel
| like MS is pushing Github and will deprecate DevOps at
| some point in the coming years.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Seems pretty serious to me. I was running my entire CI/CD
| process with gitlab.com and deploying to k8s clusters
| before GitHub Actions were even launched.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I don't think it's a serious player at enterprises
| either. MSFT is giving away GitHub Enterprise to sell
| Azure and Visual Studio licenses coupled with other
| perks. GitLab can't compete on that level and they lose
| to GitHub/MSFT on a fairly regular basis.
| iechoz6H wrote:
| gitlab-runners are also installable on OSX (MacOS)[1]
|
| 1. https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/osx.html
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Yes, if you have OSX boxes available or leverage things
| like MacStadium but Github allows you to leverage their
| MacMini farm.
| ksec wrote:
| I am probably wrong in this.
|
| I do think they are in a different market though. In that
| despite there is a Github Enterprise Product, the self host
| market shares are going to GitLab for one reason or another.
| i.e I would not be surprised if GitLab is actually winning in
| Enterprise / Big Spending Client self hosting Market.
|
| For Github, it seems most of its strength is in their SaaS,
| contractors and SME which trends towards this solution. Your
| personal contribution to Open Source as well as profile /
| portfolio would also live on Github like on a Social Network.
|
| And I can see both Github and Gitlab continue to evolve their
| strength for at least another 5 years. Generally speaking I
| dont see how Gitlab could ever compete with Github on SaaS
| given the advantage M$ has with Azure and DataCenter
| infrastructure as well as social reach. While Github wont have
| an easy path to evolve into something that compete directly
| with GibLab on self hosting solution and their trend is to move
| towards Azure Cloud solution offering to further gain synergy
| with other Microsoft Enterprise products.
|
| I do wish Gitlab put _lots and lots_ of work into performance
| though. As in performance improvement measured in order of
| magnitude, not small percentages.
| tombert wrote:
| I remember in 2014, a coworker of mine talked me into creating a
| Gitlab account, claiming "it's basically just Github, but you get
| free private repos".
|
| I liked it, used it occasionally, but didn't care much about it
| until Github was purchased by Microsoft. I didn't have a problem
| with Microsoft buying Github per say, but it made me realize that
| Github _could_ be bought, and it wasn 't some kind of glorified
| charity. I don't think MS has done a bad job with Github at all,
| but the very fact that the biggest home of open source itself
| isn't open source made me uneasy. On the day the MS buyout was
| announced, I moved all my Github repos to Gitlab.
|
| Gitlab, while still a for-profit company, at least believed in
| open source enough to release the source code for their core
| product into the wild, and have proven that they can be
| successful doing it. I'm extremely happy that they've managed to
| create a pretty outstanding project that I am happy to use, and I
| just bought three shares to prove my dedication to it.
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