[HN Gopher] Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company is...
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       Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak rev
       forecast
        
       Author : YourCupOTea
       Score  : 57 points
       Date   : 2023-03-13 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
        
       | eeasss wrote:
       | The fully remote approach may have hit its limits.
        
         | epolanski wrote:
         | Nobody I know self manages their git and integrations
         | regardless of where they physically work.
        
           | karaterobot wrote:
           | I assume that commenter is referring to Gitlab's famous
           | advocacy for remote-only work. But, it's still completely
           | irrelevant to their earnings forecast or stock price.
        
             | whateveracct wrote:
             | That commenter is a manager, which explains why they are
             | non sequitur-ing against remote work.
        
           | mmcclure wrote:
           | I think GP was referring to Gitlab itself being very vocal
           | about fully remote. Without commenting on anything else in
           | this thread, their company handbook[1] and the culture around
           | it are something I find pretty interesting.
           | 
           | [1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-
           | remote/guide/
        
       | nativecoinc wrote:
       | We use Bitbucket at work. If we switched to some other forge next
       | week I would not care.
       | 
       | Git forges should be expendable.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | The moat is CI, or more accurately that Gitlab CI is really
         | good and using it requires hosting your code there.
        
       | activitypea wrote:
       | As much as I love the product, I've really come to dislike Gitlab
       | as a company. The constant price hikes and the gutting of the
       | free tier aren't exactly developer-friendly.
        
         | packetlost wrote:
         | Same. They forced GitHub to quit resting on their laurels, at
         | least.
        
       | hypothesis wrote:
       | That seems to account for layoff and upcoming pricing changes.
        
       | nimbius wrote:
       | things like github and gitlab always struck me as oddities. it
       | costs virtually nothing to deploy a containerized gitea and
       | jenkins, or gitlab CE, and you have direct control over its
       | performance and options without any spend.
       | 
       | call me old fashioned but these online git-o-matic sites just
       | seem more like rent-seeking during a recession.
        
         | shrimpx wrote:
         | > it costs virtually nothing to ...
         | 
         | Yeah but what's the cost of a global developer social network?
        
           | vlunkr wrote:
           | This is important, but also, "virtually nothing" is a lie. I
           | think self hosting can work, but you have to be honest about
           | the costs. Deployment, maintenance, rotating logs, training
           | others on all this.
        
         | activitypea wrote:
         | BrandonM, is that you?
        
         | imron wrote:
         | How much does it cost to pay someone to administer? Including
         | backups, BCP, integration with SSO etc?
         | 
         | It'll work for a 5 person startup, but will get expensive fast
         | for larger organizations.
        
         | mac-chaffee wrote:
         | I always reference this post when the subject of self-hosting
         | "simple" things comes up:
         | https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/RunningSer...
        
         | stavros wrote:
         | This comment strikes me as fundamentally misunderstanding the
         | purpose of GitHub. I don't care that I can set up Gitea (and I
         | already have an instance), I want GitHub because it makes it
         | trivial for people to issue PRs to my code.
         | 
         | Then, because everyone has a GitHub account and knows how to
         | use it, and everyone is already on it, everyone else goes on it
         | too.
         | 
         | Not to mention that I don't need to maintain CI/container
         | registries/asset hosts/pages myself.
        
           | vorpalhex wrote:
           | There was an attempt to bring a distributed forge
           | architecture to gitea and co. The idea being the project
           | could be hosted on one instance but you could fork to your
           | own to do your work before PRing back to the project.
           | 
           | Github but bring your own.
           | 
           | I believe the project died out but it was a good idea. All
           | the benefits of Github without the lock in and single point
           | of failure.
        
             | stavros wrote:
             | Yeah, that would have been really good... Too bad it
             | doesn't seem to have come to nothing.
        
           | zht wrote:
           | this is the dropbox comment for GitHub lol
        
         | yamtaddle wrote:
         | If you champion self-hosting gitea or gitlab CE, get your way,
         | and something bad happens, you may, personally, be in trouble.
         | 
         | If you just go with Github or Gitlab, and something bad
         | happens, nobody will blame you.
        
       | c2h5oh wrote:
       | The fact they can leave things as serious as this
       | https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/344919 unfixed for
       | almost a year and a half basically makes them not suitable for
       | serious use in my opinion.
       | 
       | And since my opinion often matters they continue to lose
       | business.
        
         | maccard wrote:
         | It's hard to blame them for every specific bug. It might be
         | incredibly important to you, but not to others, and there's
         | probably another showstopper bug for someone else that isn't
         | important for you in return.
        
       | swyx wrote:
       | in their earnings call @systses also announced that he has cancer
       | but is powering thru it working full time even while he receives
       | chemotherapy.
       | 
       | wishing him the best of health. he inspires me constantly.
       | https://twitter.com/OnodaCapital/status/1635379330498060289
        
       | xeromal wrote:
       | I made a garbage tool to pull repositories from gitlab to github
       | or vice versa. I used it just to explore Go so it's not really
       | prod ready but handy if you're just looking to move your code
       | over.
       | 
       | It most likely will explode.
       | 
       | https://github.com/tylerjgarland/git2git
        
       | stavros wrote:
       | As a user who really liked GitLab, there are a few things that
       | made me consider to move back to GitHub:
       | 
       | 1. They had a generous organization free tier, which was handy
       | for stealthily moving companies to it (move a few repos, get
       | people used to it, then move more repos, then when everyone
       | recognizes the value, start paying). They ruined that as soon as
       | they put a limit on the number of people that can be in an org
       | for free. Moving stealthily was good because...
       | 
       | 2. GitLab CI was best-of-breed, but GitHub Actions is really good
       | too now (maybe better? I haven't used it enough to answer that).
       | 
       | 3. The price is really high now, so it doesn't really make sense
       | to even move a company over to it.
       | 
       | 4. The community is (and has always been) on GitHub, so there was
       | always a big reason to be there. Now that the rest of the GitLab
       | offerings aren't as competitive, this wins.
        
       | mkl95 wrote:
       | What happened to Gitlab? They used to be one step ahead of Github
       | in some areas, then seemed to go full enterprisey and lost their
       | competitive edge. I smell some sales oriented strategies.
        
         | aynyc wrote:
         | When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as
         | long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing
         | than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't
         | care much for CI integrations.
        
           | mkl95 wrote:
           | I remember Gitlab having some features that Github lacked and
           | subsequently ripped off, such as merge queues.
        
             | imran-iq wrote:
             | also free private repositories, the github free tier used
             | to be very lacking to say the least
        
           | agumonkey wrote:
           | There was a tiny period where github was a bit stagnant and
           | gitlab felt more capable. Felt a bit like mysql vs postgres.
           | Now I think github got the lead back (slightly simpler
           | UI/workflow). But i don't know much.
        
           | IlPeach wrote:
           | Yeah that was before Microsoft bought GitHub. GH had been
           | constantly exceeding expectations and GitLab trying to play
           | catch up (which smells of bad product strategy).
        
         | samspenc wrote:
         | GitLab increased their prices significantly in the past two
         | years, which resulted in them being less competitive on price
         | than GitHub and others
         | https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/03/02/gitlab-premium-upda...
         | 
         | As others have pointed out in comments, their features seem to
         | be incomplete but I think it's their higher price points that
         | pushed users away.
        
         | Analemma_ wrote:
         | TBF, I don't think Gitlab was ever ahead of, or even close to,
         | GitHub. They got a lot of hype here a couple years ago when
         | everyone decided they hated GitHub now because boo Microsoft,
         | but that didn't mean GL was an actual competitor. People who
         | migrated on hype got burned.
        
         | epolanski wrote:
         | You made me curious and I checked their financial report.
         | 
         | Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in
         | sales in 2022.
         | 
         | Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other
         | financial reports (such as Cloudflare's).
         | 
         | On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash
         | positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand
         | GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors such
         | as GitHub to make me bet on them 10 years from now.
        
         | mindwok wrote:
         | I think it's a consequence of going public. Enterprise is where
         | the money is at, and public companies have huge amounts of
         | pressure to chase the money. I have a lot of love for GitLab,
         | so I hope the strategy works and they can reinvest profits into
         | making the product better for all developers, not just
         | enterprise, but at this stage of their lifecycle it seems this
         | is the strategy they have to play.
        
       | arsome wrote:
       | Too many things in Gitlab feel half-baked, like their
       | requirements feature which is essentially just their issue
       | tracker, no document management, just toss some issues in the
       | bin. And they expect enterprises to pay for it because they
       | checked the feature box.
       | 
       | https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/requirements/
        
         | lmiller1990 wrote:
         | To be fair, a lot of enterprise sales is based on "ticking
         | boxes".
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | fletchowns wrote:
         | I've had a good experience using GitLab for source code
         | repositories, pipelines, and code reviews. I don't have much
         | experience using it for issue tracking and document management
         | since we use Jira & Confluence for that. For my own hobby
         | projects outside of work the free tier has been great, and it
         | was easy to host my own gitlab runner so that I don't have to
         | pay for CI/CD minutes.
        
           | epolanski wrote:
           | Same here I only had good experience with it and I just can't
           | get used to other PR review UIs.
           | 
           | That being said if I were a CTO I would not buy their
           | services, I think they are too expensive.
        
         | gscho wrote:
         | Even though features are half-baked I still think the future is
         | bright for them, especially if GitHub slips up or gets
         | complacent. Intel showed us that it is possible.
        
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       (page generated 2023-03-13 23:00 UTC)