[HN Gopher] Gitlab names Bill Staples as new CEO
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Gitlab names Bill Staples as new CEO
        
       Author : tolerable
       Score  : 257 points
       Date   : 2024-12-05 21:36 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.businesswire.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.businesswire.com)
        
       | stavros wrote:
       | I was a huge Gitlab fan until their pricing change. I don't
       | remember the pricing specifics, but the tier breakdown was such
       | that you could introduce GitLab for free to a company that used
       | Github, use it alongside Github, and slowly switch repo by repo,
       | which was a very effective strategy (I used it in a few companies
       | I joined).
       | 
       | After the pricing change, you had to start paying immediately
       | (from the 6th user onwards or something), which made it a
       | nonstarter because no company would start immediately paying for
       | a Github replacement they didn't even know they wanted.
       | 
       | Together with Github being priced very cheaply, plus having free
       | private repos, plus having the entire OSS world on it (for my OSS
       | projects), I switched to it and never looked back.
        
         | freedomben wrote:
         | Same. That pricing change was one of the dumbest moves I can
         | remember from a tech company. It should be the textbook example
         | of a short-term profit grab at the complete sacrifice of long-
         | term strategy.
         | 
         | I was a huge gitlab fan and would not have thought much of
         | anything else, but the pricing made that impossible. The
         | product has also suffered greatly as a result of the years of
         | poor decision making at the top. It's one of the most
         | unfortunate outcomes I can recall.
        
           | sofixa wrote:
           | > short-term profit grab
           | 
           | They still don't make a profit. So much more a "try to become
           | profitable in a changing financial landscape that will give
           | us much less runway to do so" than "short-term profit grab"
        
       | tapoxi wrote:
       | Sid was diagnosed with osteosarcoma a while back, so hopefully
       | he's on the road to recovery but stepping down isn't usually a
       | sign things are going smoothly.
        
         | kmbfjr wrote:
         | That kind of diagnosis profoundly changes you, I know after
         | having two cancer diagnoses in a year.
         | 
         | For him, it may be bad, or it may be just realizing either
         | outcome, time is short.
        
       | Macha wrote:
       | At first I saw "to focus on his health" and assumed it was
       | typical PR speak to cover someone asked to leave, but the amount
       | of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem otherwise. I'd noticed
       | he wasn't as often active in Gitlab related threads, and I guess
       | that explains that too. Hope the recovery continues to go well.
       | 
       | ---
       | 
       | I do think the change in leadership is probably more a
       | continuation of Gitlab moving from a developer focused company to
       | one focused on enterprise sales, so the product is probably going
       | to continue to feel less interesting for me. They were pretty
       | innovative in how open they were, so I hope at least some of that
       | survives.
        
         | mgfist wrote:
         | I don't think companies ever use "health" as cover to fire
         | someone, even that is a step to far. Usually they say "personal
         | reasons" or "to spend time with family", or "mutually
         | beneficial" etc.. "Health" is usually something quite serious.
        
           | tuananh wrote:
           | > On today's earnings call, I am announcing that I am
           | transitioning from my role as GitLab's CEO and will serve as
           | the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus
           | on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going
           | well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards
           | making a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love
           | is not easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for
           | GitLab.
           | 
           | Indeed, he has cancer.
        
           | jedberg wrote:
           | Usually when a the founding CEO of a public company steps
           | into a strategic non-operations position, it's basically
           | their way of saying "I'm taking the money and retiring"
           | without tanking the stock by just leaving.
           | 
           | By taking a strategic role, investors are less worried
           | because they know the CEO is still around.
           | 
           | But in this case it looks like it is legitimately a health
           | reason. I hope he heals quickly.
        
         | tuananh wrote:
         | > On today's earnings call, I am announcing that I am
         | transitioning from my role as GitLab's CEO and will serve as
         | the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on
         | my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well,
         | my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making
         | a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love is not
         | easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for GitLab.
         | 
         | He has cancer.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | > but the amount of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem
           | otherwise. I'd noticed he wasn't as often active in Gitlab
           | related threads, and I guess that explains that too. Hope the
           | recovery continues to go well.
           | 
           | OP got to that.
        
         | beanjuiceII wrote:
         | bill staples was brought on new relic to sell the company, now
         | he's brought onto gitlab to do the same
        
         | bastardoperator wrote:
         | How do they intend on competing in the enterprise space? MSFT
         | and Atlassian will happily bundle their SCM offering for 0
         | dollars if you spend enough on licensing other core products
         | like visual studio or jira.
        
       | tolerable wrote:
       | Good luck sytse. We love you!
        
       | 1propionyl wrote:
       | > What started as a collaboration tool for developers is now the
       | leading AI-powered DevSecOps platform.
       | 
       | Uh...
        
       | tyre wrote:
       | > GitLab Inc., (NASDAQ: GTLB), the most comprehensive AI-powered
       | DevSecOps platform
        
         | cedws wrote:
         | The what?
        
           | dijit wrote:
           | You know... the disruptive, game-changing tech company
           | redefining source code hosting for the modern enterprise.
           | Their cloud-native, next-gen platform is engineered for
           | scalable, seamless integration with your DevOps pipeline,
           | delivering end-to-end automation and real-time collaboration.
           | Powered by AI-driven insights and built for maximum uptime,
           | they offer enterprise-grade security, unmatched
           | interoperability, and hyper-optimized CI/CD workflows. With a
           | global, distributed infrastructure, they guarantee future-
           | proof performance that accelerates your agile transformation
           | --because your innovation deserves nothing less than
           | excellence.
           | 
           | or.. something.
        
             | richbell wrote:
             | No single pane of glass is a deal-breaker for me, sorry.
        
           | swozey wrote:
           | They built a very nice declarative CI/CD system before Github
           | Actions existed. I think I was on Bamboo (and Jenkins) before
           | going over to Gitlab and it was a breath of fresh air, a huge
           | understatement. 2015ish.
        
         | AzzieElbab wrote:
         | They should place their Git backend on the blockchain to
         | collect all the power stones.
        
           | cyberax wrote:
           | Git is already a blockchain.
        
             | pests wrote:
             | Technically but not in terms people would describe a block
             | chain. It's a chain of blocks yes, but its not the same.
        
               | ktpsns wrote:
               | Git repositories are hash trees. The distributed nature
               | of git is a bit different but it shares similiarities.
               | Definitly has the crypto checkmarks ticked.
        
               | Diti wrote:
               | AFAIK, the main thing that makes a blockchain a
               | "blockchain" in the cryptocurrency sense, is the handling
               | of consensus in case of double spend (race condition
               | during a transaction), also known as Byzantine fault. Not
               | really something Git has been built for.
        
         | dysoco wrote:
         | Yeah I chuckled at that
        
         | amatuer_sodapop wrote:
         | I think AI-powered is fast approaching the "webscale" status.
        
           | eddythompson80 wrote:
           | It's already there. Plenty of developer focused docs have
           | been updated to mention AI however possible. I was just
           | reading stripe docs, and was surprised by the number of
           | fairly old features that got a doc update so instead of
           | saying "For example, if you're selling a digital subscription
           | with a physical item" to "For example, if you're selling
           | access to an AI service with a physical item".
           | 
           | Or replacing "For example, If you're charging for API
           | requests" to "For example, If you're charging for LLama AI
           | Model API requests".
           | 
           | Heck, I had to review a doc change at work that was pretty
           | stupid. Like one thing we offer is an S3-compatible endpoint.
           | But someone thought we should clarify that you can upload AI
           | models there too and all our docs should include an "AI
           | developer" section for how to upload a blob that also happen
           | to be a model or a lora or whatever.
        
             | mattgreenrocks wrote:
             | Has a real "how do you do, fellow kids?" energy to it.
        
               | eddythompson80 wrote:
               | That's exactly the feeling I got but didn't know how to
               | put into words.
        
             | Macha wrote:
             | You don't happen to work at Minio do you?
             | 
             | Because apparently Minio is for AI these days:
             | https://min.io/
        
               | eddythompson80 wrote:
               | Ha that's hilarious! And no I work at another tech
               | company, but I totally understand how minio decided to go
               | with that marketing. It's really infuriating and yet
               | understandable.
               | 
               | When the AI craze stated, so many people in my company
               | came to me asking "if we can run AI workload"? _another
               | thing we offer is fairly generic compute meant for your
               | average web applications or micro service etc._ Initially
               | I said "I don't think so. We don't have GPUs nor do we
               | have any ability to express hardware requirements beyond
               | CPU and Memory. We'll need to do some work to include GPU
               | into that".
               | 
               | Then hilariously I learned that you don't need GPUs or
               | ASICs to be able to run "AI workloads". If your compute
               | allows you to call OpenAI rest APIs, then you're also "AI
               | Ready".
        
         | labster wrote:
         | GTLB is perfect for ESG investing because it's powered entirely
         | from hot air generated by buzzwords.
        
         | keyle wrote:
         | Thanks for pointing that out, that made me gulp and I'm not
         | even sure what 'Sec' they're talking about seeing they were
         | recently featured in a defcon talk.
        
           | vundercind wrote:
           | To be fair, having the "Sec" in your "DevSecOps" signify
           | _nothing whatsoever_ is basically the industry standard for
           | companies describing their offerings with that term.
        
           | HdS84 wrote:
           | They have a sast scanner offering..we tried to use it Basic
           | thinks like "ignore this slew of reporting because the build
           | is already deprecated" or "always ignore this error, false
           | positive" are missing. The last few years gitlab only did
           | marketing checklist driven development.
        
             | jamesfinlayson wrote:
             | Yes, I've used it and the behaviour that we saw was it
             | reporting every issue that had been in the repo ever
             | (including in files that had been deleted). Which I suppose
             | you might want, but every other scanning tool I've used
             | chose the sensible default of scan what is there now.
             | 
             | Also, as far as I can, the security centre wouldn't let you
             | download a .csv of current security issues in the repo -
             | the UI lets you do a bunch of filtering, but the .csv
             | always gives you everything, including issues that you've
             | closed.
        
               | HdS84 wrote:
               | It's even worse when you scan your build artifacts, in
               | our case containers. Each build added to the list , with
               | no way to delete all stuff. Filtering and grouping are
               | also missing.
               | 
               | We gave up on that and decided to use another tool.
               | 
               | My gripe with GL is that all features are like this now.
               | There is no invest into the basic building blocks, just
               | yapping for the next trend. Most customers for GL use it
               | on premise because they want to use it on prem. I would
               | focus on Features that benefit that crowd, but hey I am
               | just an developing not a gilded c suite.
        
         | nojs wrote:
         | It's the tagline in the hero shot on their homepage too.
        
         | tqi wrote:
         | Sounds like Gitlab hired the "Category Design Advisors" from
         | Play Bigger LLC...
        
       | aestetix wrote:
       | Maybe now they will change their stupid pricing plan and let
       | people pay monthly.
       | 
       | Edit: I did not see before that Sid had cancer. I send him wishes
       | for a good recovery!
        
       | jlengrand wrote:
       | "Not CEO of Gitlab here", for those who have been here long
       | enough to recognize this. Really hope you're doing ok buddy.
        
       | burnte wrote:
       | They would have hired Bill Posters but he's being prosecuted.
        
         | danryan wrote:
         | Bill Posters is innocent!
        
       | griomnib wrote:
       | The photos look like an AI was given the prompt "tech ceo,
       | headshot, for press release".
        
         | Lammy wrote:
         | 50/50 chance to generate one looking directly at the camera, or
         | one in 3/4 view where one hand is holding a microphone with the
         | other palm extended toward unseen audience.
        
           | griomnib wrote:
           | "Hands or GTFO" is the new "PoC or GTFO".
        
       | luuurker wrote:
       | Cancer... hope the treatment is working well and wish you a full
       | recovery.
        
       | sqs wrote:
       | Congratulations and thank you to Sid, the GitLab CEO, for
       | building an incredible company and product.
       | 
       | GitLab was the first code host to add more products (CI,
       | security, ops, helpdesk, analytics, etc.) and create a whole
       | suite, and GitHub followed. GitLab also built for the enterprise
       | years before GitHub started to give appropriate love to the
       | enterprise. Some people think that GitLab is a GitHub clone.
       | Quite the opposite!
       | 
       | Even if you don't use GitLab yourself, you've been a huge
       | beneficiary of the dev workflow GitLab envisioned and created,
       | and of the competition they've given to Microsoft/GitHub.
       | Competition in this space makes everything better.
        
         | mikepurvis wrote:
         | Indeed. Github Actions runs because GitLab CI walked and Travis
         | crawled. There's a clear evolution through line with how each
         | laid the groundwork for the successor.
        
           | benatkin wrote:
           | I disagree that GitHub Actions is much more powerful than
           | GitLab. Both can be helped by a YC company, depot.dev, if you
           | literally mean running containers quickly and reliably.
           | GitHub Actions _can_ be easier to set up if you like having
           | stuff outside of your repo and an OCI image. GitLab may not
           | have the actions library that GitHub has but it can pull
           | docker images and that's a powerful build library.
        
             | mikepurvis wrote:
             | Ah interesting, yeah the whole container build -> CI build
             | has been a long-standing paint point for me across Github,
             | GitLab, and even Jenkins. I will investigate what depot.dev
             | is doing.... cause yeah, proper and intelligent on-demand
             | rebuilding of based containers could be a game changer.
        
               | kylegalbraith wrote:
               | One of the founders of Depot here. Always feel free to
               | ping me directly (email in my bio) if you ever want to
               | chat more about container builds in general.
        
               | mikepurvis wrote:
               | For sure! I've always felt like a bit of a loner in that
               | the assumption in most of these platforms is that your
               | build starts with either something barebones (just apt)
               | or maybe your platform only (python3:latest).
               | 
               | However, I've typically dealt with builds that have a
               | very heavy dependency load (10-20GB) where it isn't
               | desirable to install everything every time-- I'd rather
               | have an intermediate "deps" container that the build can
               | start from. But I don't want to have to manually
               | lifecycle that container; if I have a manifest of what's
               | in my apt repo vs the current container, it should just
               | know automatically when a container rebuild is required.
        
         | hardwaresofton wrote:
         | > GitLab was the first code host to add more products (CI,
         | security, ops, helpdesk, analytics, etc.) and create a whole
         | suite, and GitHub followed.
         | 
         | Disclaimer: I've worked with Sid and his team in the past.
         | 
         | Few people realize how long it's been since GitLab was a simple
         | clone -- there has been a ton of legitimate net new innovation,
         | and that happened under Sid (and of course all the awesome
         | people working at GitLab).
         | 
         | Another thing that's actually insanely under-discussed is how
         | openly GitLab runs and how that's been a _successful_ model for
         | them. I 'm not sure I know another open core company that has
         | been so successful in the space of developers who bend over
         | backwards to pay nothing and spend hours of their own time
         | (read $$$$$) to host their own <X>.
         | 
         | IMO they are the only credible competitor to GitHub, and
         | they're open core, huge open source orgs, small companies, and
         | large companies trust them (rightfully so), and they've built
         | this all while being incredibly open and to this day you can
         | still self-host their core software (which is a force
         | multiplier for software companies).
        
           | jeroenhd wrote:
           | Gitlab used to stand alone in the "Github replacement"
           | market, but these days Gitea is quickly closing in on them. I
           | hope the competition will drive Gitlab to continue to
           | compete, but the switch to "AI everything" makes me weary for
           | its future.
           | 
           | Without Gitlab, Github would've taken years, maybe even
           | longer, to develop what it has become today. I don't think
           | Gitea and its forks would exist.
           | 
           | Now if only Github would go the extra mile and copy another
           | feature from Gitlab (IPv6 support)...
        
           | itronitron wrote:
           | GitLab is currently marketing itself as the "AI-powered
           | DevSecOps platform" which in my view ditches it's
           | history/brand as an open and transparent alternative to
           | GitHub.
        
           | whazor wrote:
           | But GitHub enterprise is not a great product. So the other
           | around, I wouldn't want to call Github a credible competitor
           | to Gitlab.
        
       | Narretz wrote:
       | > GitLab Inc., (NASDAQ: GTLB), the most comprehensive AI-powered
       | DevSecOps platform
       | 
       | Oh, that description explains why the core pipeline authoring and
       | capabilities have made almost no progress in the last few years.
       | I actually thought gitlab still branded itself as a "classic" dev
       | ops tool.
        
         | griomnib wrote:
         | I was actually looking at them as a GitHub alternative and
         | their homepage has so much vaporware AI BS on it that's as far
         | as I got.
         | 
         | Ironically I was very open to paying for a service, but the "AI
         | AI AI!" lost them at least one sale.
        
           | lolinder wrote:
           | This press release makes a big deal out of them counting
           | "more than 50% of the Fortune 100" as customers, which goes a
           | long way towards explaining their decline in favor among
           | devs. They're not interested in your sale any more, they're
           | only interested in large enterprises, and are apparently
           | doing very well in that market.
        
             | stackskipton wrote:
             | I doubt 50% of Fortune 100 customers are all in on GitLab.
             | My guess is most of their F100 customers are acquisitions
             | that were using Gitlab and continue to use Gitlab.
             | 
             | When my company was acquired by $MegaCorp, I noted one of
             | vendors was like "trusted by $MegaCorp" because yes
             | technically, they got a check from $MegaCorp but $MegaCorp
             | was not interested in becoming further customer.
        
               | scaryclam wrote:
               | Or one or two devs in the F100 customers made an account
               | using their work email so they could chuck some OSS
               | prototype code somewhere, or test something out.
        
           | jamesfinlayson wrote:
           | Yes I've seen it a place I've worked - GitLab is pushing hard
           | on AI right now, and I don't believe it's cheap either.
           | 
           | Ironically, the JetBrains autocomplete is better than their
           | DUO plugin - JetBrains is faster and the GitLab plugin causes
           | my IDE to completely lock up at least once a day.
        
           | itronitron wrote:
           | I was at a 'techtalk' recently with over 100 attendees, where
           | Gitlab was a sponsor and the second of two talks. Before
           | either talk the GitLab person gave a short pitch on the whole
           | GitLab AI developer productivity vision and how great they
           | are.
           | 
           | There was a short break after the first talk concluded during
           | which about a third of the attendees left, myself included.
        
             | throwaway2037 wrote:
             | I am confused. What is the lesson to be learnt here? Did
             | the last two talks look boring? ... And that is why you
             | left? Were people annoyed with pre-talk pitch by GitLab?
        
               | an-honest-moose wrote:
               | People heard the AI spiel and lost interest.
        
         | vundercind wrote:
         | Wow. Almost none of those words would have even been among my
         | third-string choices of words to use to describe gitlab in one
         | short sentence. "The" and "platform" might have made it.
        
           | remram wrote:
           | "The _other_ code hosting platform "?
        
             | vundercind wrote:
             | "GitHub for if you compete with MS and someone high in your
             | org is concerned about letting MS host your code."
             | 
             | "GitHub with a worse UI except GitHub's has been getting
             | worse for years so now they're both similarly bad so never
             | mind"
             | 
             | "Worse gitea but with more features so sometimes it's
             | better"
        
               | jamesfinlayson wrote:
               | Having used GitLab Enterprise, I'd describe it as having
               | 99% of the features that you could ever want, but those
               | features are generally executed no more than 75% well.
        
         | remram wrote:
         | Or search. What a useless devops platform if you can't find
         | issue by searching for words that appear in comments. Only
         | words appearing in the issue title/description are found and
         | this is infuriating every day.
         | 
         | Can't believe they'd put "AI-powered" there when it can't even
         | be used to find exact word matches.
        
         | whatsakandr wrote:
         | I used to think gitlab was the bees knees, but more recently
         | there's just a lack of user awareness. They've had a open issue
         | for years about failing a job due to not finding artifacts. The
         | logs even say "ERROR" I've concluded they're now a marketing
         | organization.
        
           | HdS84 wrote:
           | It's normal to Google "how to do x in gitlab" and then there
           | is a ticker in their issue tracker to add x from 2018. GL
           | employees all agrees that it would be great. Thrn there are
           | 374747 label changes and no resolution until today.
        
             | usr1106 wrote:
             | While this is not a completely wrong observation, it's
             | worse for Atlassian BitBucket. With github I have no
             | experience.
        
           | progval wrote:
           | This is common for huge open source projects. However, when
           | you send a patch to Gitlab, they will assign someone to guide
           | you through the process, and the patch will be merged
           | eventually unless you bail out or they outright reject it.
        
         | progval wrote:
         | That's copy-pasted from https://about.gitlab.com/ .
         | 
         | I love that it implies there is a more comprehensive DevSecOps
         | platform that isn't AI-powered.
        
       | VulgarExigency wrote:
       | He's the former CEO of Staples. He's going to have to change his
       | name to Bill Gitlab.
        
         | lawik wrote:
         | Already standard practice for fighters in Muay Thai. Don't see
         | why CEOs shouldn't show their loyalty.
        
         | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
         | He's not the former CEO of Staples - where did you find that
         | information?
        
           | CarVac wrote:
           | It's a Tim Apple joke.
        
           | VulgarExigency wrote:
           | I made it up
        
             | benatkin wrote:
             | A very reliable source!
        
       | redeux wrote:
       | So, do we think Staples and the board intend to sell Gitlab to
       | private equity like New Relic?
        
       | guybrush0123 wrote:
       | > As CEO at New Relic, Staples' strategic leadership and deep
       | product knowledge significantly increased the company's
       | enterprise value. By accelerating revenue and driving increased
       | profitability, he made New Relic one of the most broadly adopted
       | platforms in its category. Staples has nearly 30 years of
       | experience building developer platforms and serving developers as
       | customers. Prior to New Relic, he spent many years at Microsoft
       | and Adobe in executive leadership roles, building and scaling
       | several multi-billion-dollar businesses.
       | 
       | On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.
       | 
       | Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was
       | specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be
       | sold. Which is the _exact_ same thing he did at Marketo before
       | that.
       | 
       | He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to
       | preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
        
         | njtransit wrote:
         | Rumors are that Gitlab is for sale, so the move might make
         | sense in that regard.
        
           | nyclounge wrote:
           | Time to jump ship to codeberg/gitea? What are non commercial
           | git repos now days?
        
             | freedomben wrote:
             | I'll wait to jump ship until I see who buys them. It could
             | end up being a huge positive for a gitlab. I have been very
             | disappointed in their strategy the past few years and I
             | think they squandered an enormous opportunity and amount of
             | Goodwill with developers. If they got bought by somebody
             | good, then I think it could end up being a massive
             | positive.
        
               | marcus_holmes wrote:
               | yeah, the product is great, but the pricing is a mess. If
               | whoever buys it sorts that out it could be a win.
        
               | Gigachad wrote:
               | Microsoft buying GitHub seemed to be a huge benefit to
               | GitHub at least.
        
               | Normal_gaussian wrote:
               | GitHub was in an odd position; HR had politically
               | captured every department. A buyout by someone so big was
               | pretty much the only way to do it.
        
               | srik wrote:
               | > HR had politically captured every department
               | 
               | Could you elaborate if you can?
        
               | Lammy wrote:
               | https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/follow-up-
               | to-...
        
               | rurp wrote:
               | I used Gitlab at a previous job maybe four years ago and
               | really liked the UI. Switching to Github at the new gig
               | felt like a huge step backwards. That said, the product
               | and business news I have seen regarding Gitlab since then
               | has almost all been negative. Hopefully they are able to
               | turn things around because at one point I really hoped
               | they would overtake Github and thought it might happen.
        
             | thinkyfish wrote:
             | Forgejo jumps to mind.
        
             | ksp-atlas wrote:
             | Gitea became for profit, there's still a non profit fork
             | called Forgejo which has become fairly popular
        
               | noirscape wrote:
               | To elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is
               | still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open
               | source.
               | 
               | The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a
               | project was taken over by a company instead of being run
               | as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable
               | with that and forked it.
               | 
               | Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from
               | Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue
               | that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea
               | Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll
               | assume that it won't.)
               | 
               | It's not _that_ difficult to move git repositories around
               | after all.
        
               | a2128 wrote:
               | The ideological difference between the two projects
               | really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute
               | fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the
               | website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a
               | robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really
               | obvious when you look close)
        
               | Matumio wrote:
               | Indeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits.
               | When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page,
               | you know the project is probably a community-driven
               | effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.
        
               | nyclounge wrote:
               | Thank you for sharing this. It make a huge difference for
               | when we are choosing!
        
             | joachimma wrote:
             | Does anyone know why gitea is developed on GitHub?
        
               | teraflop wrote:
               | See this issue: https://github.com/go-
               | gitea/gitea/issues/1029
               | 
               | For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it
               | was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features.
               | Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the
               | specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have
               | been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out
               | below to actually migrate all the existing data out of
               | GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the
               | priority list.
        
           | adastra22 wrote:
           | Who would buy it?
        
             | codegeek wrote:
             | Microsoft :)
        
               | manquer wrote:
               | Won't be allowed ? They already own GitHub
        
               | cocoa19 wrote:
               | Would make no sense. They already own the most popular
               | service, owning the second one may bring monopoly
               | scrutiny.
        
             | jmclnx wrote:
             | Maybe IBM since I think Gnome and a few other large
             | projects moved there. Plus since AI is all the rage, I can
             | see someone picking it up.
             | 
             | The main question is probably the price.
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | I was thinking about that as well, given that it seems it
               | would fit in well with the red hat portfolio. They don't
               | as far as I know. Have a good answer for a gitforge, and
               | the phenomenal CI CD offering that gitlab has would be
               | very marketable to Red hat customers.
               | 
               | I would be excited if IBM acquired them and put them
               | under the red hat umbrella, because as history has shown,
               | it may mean that gitlab ends up becoming much more open.
               | They may open up the entire product instead of doing the
               | open core model.
        
               | throwaway2037 wrote:
               | Please correct me if wrong. Red Hat has OpenShift Cloud,
               | which I think has Git repo hosting, including CI/CD.
        
             | manquer wrote:
             | Many options , older companies like IBM, Google, SAP,
             | Oracle or even Salesforce (already own heroku in dev
             | tooling space so not far fetched ) with stable or slowing
             | market presence in engineering departments
             | 
             | Mid sized newer companies likes Hashicorp or datadog or
             | vercel who target developers as customers .
             | 
             | Gitlab gives access to a large audience of developers to
             | cross sell most dev tools so all these orgs can get a lot
             | of returns paying more than the standalone value of gitlab
             | itself.
             | 
             | The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have
             | strong open source pedigree so users won't be turned off
             | and leave
        
               | breadandcheese wrote:
               | Did I miss something? Didn't IBM acquire Hashicorp?
        
               | manquer wrote:
               | Yes they did, i should have clarified, as IBM is becoming
               | like Broadcom as an umbrella organization for all sorts
               | of companies, the ibm core is different beast than some
               | of the acquisitions they have been making
               | 
               | In my mind just like LinkedIn , GitHub and Microsoft are
               | every distinct entities with a lot of differences on how
               | they work , Hashicorp and IBM parent are different and
               | will remain so. Integrating into Hashicorp for Gitlab
               | would be very different than integrating into IBM core
               | with different values for both businesses .
        
               | firesteelrain wrote:
               | GitLab Premium already integrates with HashiCorp Vault
               | [1]
               | 
               | GitLab supports storing the Terraform state and includes
               | Terraform templates however they are moving to OpenTofu
               | in 18.x [2]
               | 
               | 1. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/hashicorp_vault.
               | html 2.
               | https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/deprecations.html
        
               | manquer wrote:
               | I wasn't thinking about a few focused features or
               | integrations, but more generally. i.e non product things
               | like sales and license packaging and son on.
               | 
               | If an acquisition has to make sense there should be a
               | clear path to monetize it, for IBM core or its HashiCorp
               | unit or any other buyer that will not just be through
               | some light integrations alone, they can achieved with
               | partnerships after all you don't need to buy the
               | organization for it.
        
               | firesteelrain wrote:
               | Agree. What did you have in mind? The two products are
               | already lightly integrated.
        
               | susanthenerd wrote:
               | > The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have
               | strong open source pedigree so users won't be turned off
               | and leave
               | 
               | HashiCorp might not be the best fit anymore. Last year,
               | they switched to a license that isn't open source:
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306
        
               | bigfatkitten wrote:
               | Salesforce let Heroku wither and die. I don't see them
               | sticking their toes into the dev tooling space again
               | anytime soon.
        
             | aravindputrevu wrote:
             | Google should do it. If some CorpDev of theirs are
             | listening. This could be their Satya Nadella <> GitHib
             | moment to bring back the lost shine.
        
               | makeitdouble wrote:
               | This makes a lot of sense, and is truly frightening.
               | 
               | Google isn't know for its hands-off approach nor long
               | term view for service growths. Gitlab is essential to
               | balance Github's impact, I'd hate it to go in the
               | graveyard.
        
             | guybrush0123 wrote:
             | The official rumor is DataDog:
             | 
             | https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/google-backed-
             | software...
             | 
             | Given New Relic is a direct competitor, Bill Staples'
             | background makes even more sense.
        
               | mrweasel wrote:
               | Why? And why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?
               | 
               | I seriously don't understand the deals being made in
               | tech. Most of the makes no sense, not even
               | retrospectively. I get Microsoft buying Github, that was
               | a part of their open source strategy and they've always
               | put a high value on developers.
        
               | michaelt wrote:
               | _> why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?_
               | 
               | I wouldn't buy them for that myself, but Gitlab made $200
               | million in revenue in Q3 2024 [1]. So $800 million a year
               | in revenue.
               | 
               | I've seen worse purchases.
               | 
               | [1] https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2024/GitLab-
               | Reports-...
        
               | mrweasel wrote:
               | The way the present their numbers is pretty hard to
               | understand, at least for me, did they lose $28million or
               | make $28million in that same quarter? Either way that
               | seems insanely low, if they're expected to be worth
               | $8billion. The gap between profit and revenue seems to
               | high.
               | 
               | There might be some potential for Gitlab complement your
               | other business, in which case you may not see the lack of
               | profit as that big of an issue. The problem is that if
               | you can't make those $8billions back in future profit,
               | then you're going to start making changes to the Gitlab
               | offerings until they do become profitable.
               | 
               | That might be what the new CEO is suppose to do, pump up
               | those numbers, and make it look like a sane investment.
        
             | clhodapp wrote:
             | Atlassian?
        
               | n_ary wrote:
               | They have Bitbucket already.
        
               | rickette wrote:
               | Most of these sales aren't about acquiring a product but
               | about acquiring a customer base, so it would make perfect
               | sense for Atlassian IMHO.
        
             | 2000swebgeek wrote:
             | I think its right time for AWS to buy.
             | 
             | AWS shut down their service, if AWS can "easily" integrate
             | with Gitlab, I see a lot of potential on the deployment
             | side to increase AWS revenue.
        
             | N19PEDL2 wrote:
             | I sincerely hope it's not Broadcom. A 10x price increase
             | would scare away a lot of customers.
        
           | jmclnx wrote:
           | Yes, I heard this rumor right after I moved from github to
           | gitlab. Well if I have to go elsewhere at least gitlab will
           | archive my abandoned free account for me :)
           | 
           | FWIW, I found them easier to deal wit than github, so will
           | hang tight to see how this plays out.
        
             | addicted wrote:
             | I'm curious why you would move to Gitlab.
             | 
             | Nothing they've done since they were created has ever moved
             | them in a more open source friendly direction, and they've
             | broken a ton of promises both implicit and explicit along
             | the way.
             | 
             | GitHub OTOH has only become more open source friendly
             | (minus the AI stuff, but I suspect Gitlab is no better on
             | that front).
        
               | gbear605 wrote:
               | In my experience, Gitlab is a lot more stable than
               | Github. My last job was on Github, and we had an outage a
               | couple times a month at least. We even had a Slack emote
               | for it! My current job is on Gitlab, and we haven't had a
               | single outage in the year that we've been on them.
        
               | elcritch wrote:
               | Second that. My job before last moved to a locally hosted
               | enterprise Github instance, which promptly ate itself.
               | The specs required to run it were also impressive,
               | something like 64gb minimum to boot but more was strongly
               | recommended.
        
               | not_your_vase wrote:
               | Haha, I keep getting burned by GitHub outages even as a
               | private contributor with my personal account... speaking
               | of which, I expect one outage soon, this week so far it
               | has been available always when I needed it...
        
               | jraph wrote:
               | What are you referring to?
               | 
               | Gitlab is open core, (not great but better than nothing)
               | while github is zero open source.
        
               | dec0dedab0de wrote:
               | You can't self host Github.
        
               | eliaspro wrote:
               | You can (Github Enterprise)!
        
               | elcritch wrote:
               | If you're brave!
        
               | flohofwoe wrote:
               | One feature area where Gitlab is still better for
               | realworld stuff is CI (Gitlab CI vs Github Actions). Yes,
               | you can do most things on both, but Gitlab CI makes a lot
               | more sense.
               | 
               | In general, Github still feels like it's built for hobby
               | coders (focusing on simplicity instead of configurability
               | - which doesn't have to be a bad thing) while Gitlab
               | feels like it's built for professional teams from the
               | ground up.
        
               | usr1106 wrote:
               | I have used Gitlab CI basically daily for over 5 years
               | and it makes sense. I would need to think hard to come up
               | with something that seems fundamentally wrong.
               | 
               | I have never used Github Actions. Can you explain or give
               | some examples what doesn't make sense?
        
               | plantain wrote:
               | Try and test a Github Action locally - it's an
               | engineering project up there with the Space Shuttle.
               | Repositories around the world are filled with endless
               | commits of "test1", "test2", "test3" trying to debug
               | their actions in prod.
        
               | pid-1 wrote:
               | That particular issue also exists in GitLab. See
               | https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/2797
        
               | imp0cat wrote:
               | Right, but Gitlab does have the excellent built-in
               | pipeline editor that will visualize and validate your
               | pipelines for you.
               | 
               | It can also render the complete pipeline config (making
               | it easy to run and debug the problematic parts locally
               | just by copying the relevant parts, even if they're
               | hidden in and include somewhere).
        
               | flohofwoe wrote:
               | IIRC Github Actions started as a 'visual editor' where
               | you would drop and arrange 'Actions' and define the data
               | flow between actions, but what most people want from a CI
               | system is just a script/config file in their git repo
               | which defines what command line tools to run, and to
               | group those commands in jobs dependending on each other
               | so that some jobs can run in parallel (which Github
               | Actions only implemented as an afterthought after users
               | demanded it).
               | 
               | To reuse code, Gitlab CI has simple template files which
               | you can import into your toplevel .gitlab-ci.yml, and you
               | have an inheritance system to derive new jobs from other
               | jobs. That's a very simple and powerful system.
               | 
               | Code reuse in Github works with above mentioned 'actions'
               | where each action seems to be a whole repository of stuff
               | instead of a single file like in Gitlab CI.
               | 
               | Gitlab CI seems to be designed by people who know what
               | they do and what their users need, while Github Actions
               | seems to be designed by architecture astronauts, and has
               | only afterwards and reluctantly been hammered into a
               | shape where it does the things most users expect.
        
               | noirscape wrote:
               | GitHub Actions feels like it was first designed to let
               | people customize the GitHub Pages deploy flow (since
               | GitHub by default only offered Jekyll as a static site
               | generator, and Jekyll is Ruby tooling and not lightweight
               | to run at all) and as a CI tool second, being molded into
               | behaving like one after Travis CI went bad for open
               | source projects.
               | 
               | Gitlab CI actually seems like it was made for CI in the
               | first place.
        
               | miohtama wrote:
               | GitHub Actions is rebranded Microsoft Azure product AFAIK
        
               | omcnoe wrote:
               | If I remember correctly GitHub CI is pretty much a
               | straight port of Microsoft's existing Azure DevOps CI,
               | done pretty soon after the acquisition. The rest of Azure
               | DevOps UX is kinda insane so it's no surprise the CI is a
               | bit of a pain too.
        
               | DanielHB wrote:
               | And Github Actions is somehow superior to CircleCI in
               | many ways!
        
               | cmgbhm wrote:
               | Understanding how tokens get passed around. The pattern
               | in Gitlab seems to be much more explicit.
               | 
               | Protected branches and associated secrets. Much cleaner
               | construct on gitlab.
               | 
               | GitHub actions defacto seems to be tracing yaml to
               | compiled JavaScript to hopefully that right source to
               | shell commands.
               | 
               | Gitlab seems to be yaml to shell commands.
               | 
               | Nested projects. Nice midspot between monorepo and access
               | control management.
               | 
               | API. I may be out of date on it but I recall the gitlab
               | apis as pretty sensible. The github apis for
               | administration has a very odd rest/graphql split.
        
               | mhh__ wrote:
               | I find them both equally bad just in different ways.
               | 
               | Compare the gitlab UI with phabricator for example. The
               | workflows are mostly a strange mixture of whatever github
               | made up on the back of a napkin and Stakeholder-
               | consultant slop.
        
               | mathstuf wrote:
               | GitLab has accepted my patches...do you have a timeline
               | for when Github will do the same? Sure, maybe the
               | directions are different, but the baselines couldn't be
               | more different either.
        
               | robin_reala wrote:
               | I recently had a GitHub patch accepted:
               | https://github.com/primer/css/pull/2680
        
               | mathstuf wrote:
               | Neat...though considering how far removed it is from the
               | actual behaviors of the forge rather than things that are
               | essentially "bikeshed topics", I'm still not very
               | convinced that Github is even in the same league as
               | GitLab in "OSS friendliness".
        
               | imp0cat wrote:
               | I may be biased, but one of the reasons probably is that
               | it's not Microsoft.
        
               | sofixa wrote:
               | GitHub is open source friendly on paper, but almost
               | nothing they do is actually open source, or even source
               | available. Contrast that to GitLab who are actually open
               | core, and the vast majority of their software if publicly
               | available for free with a very permissive license.
               | 
               | One talks about open source because it's the de facto
               | home of open source. The other is actually open source.
        
             | edm0nd wrote:
             | I'm curious, why did you make such a move? Seems like it
             | would be way better to work for Github and then try to
             | bounce to somewhere inside MS instead.
        
               | javawizard wrote:
               | I'm pretty sure GP is referring to moving between GitHub
               | and GitLab as repository hosts, not as employers.
        
           | FooBarWidget wrote:
           | How does this make sense? Gitlab is a public company, it's
           | already for sale to anyone.
        
             | sgt wrote:
             | A lot more goes into selling a company or a controlling
             | share. All the ducks in a row and the company really needs
             | to prove that it is worth X price.
        
           | lotsofpulp wrote:
           | Gitlab is a publicly traded company, it's literally been for
           | sale to anyone who wants it for 3 years.
           | 
           | If you made an offer to buy it for ~$15B right now, the board
           | would basically have to approve the sale.
        
         | woah wrote:
         | What needs to be done to prepare it for sale?
        
           | griomnib wrote:
           | Slash costs/headcount in short term, sell, pocket the cash
           | and get the hell out of dodge.
        
             | guybrush0123 wrote:
             | Not _necessarily_. If you want the best price for the
             | company, you might want to grow it before you sell it.
             | 
             | New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but
             | they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.
        
               | griomnib wrote:
               | Fair, hopefully the gitlab employees won't get _totally_
               | screwed!
        
               | bastardoperator wrote:
               | They hired an axe man, people are getting hurt.
        
           | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
           | Produce attractive numbers. Often by cutting costs.
        
           | colechristensen wrote:
           | There are plenty of due-diligence internal things that need
           | to be put in order to make your company attractive.
           | Processes, documentation, compliance, etc.
           | 
           | Then there are things like having roadmaps for the future to
           | make you look attractive.
           | 
           | Then there are vulture things to make your numbers look good
           | which can range from doing neglected cleanups of actually
           | unnecessary costs to cutting costs in ways that really suck
           | for customers and employees.
        
           | johannes1234321 wrote:
           | Aside from things mentioned by others: Having a network to
           | potential buyers.
        
         | echelon wrote:
         | GitLab doesn't really make sense as an independent company.
         | 
         | Horrific outcomes: Atlassian, Oracle, or IBM buys it.
         | 
         | Great outcomes: Google, Amazon, or JetBrains ($7B private
         | valuation) buys it.
        
           | griomnib wrote:
           | Eh, Google it goes to the graveyard (rip Google code), Amazon
           | it gets buried, JetBrains would be cool tho.
        
             | adastra22 wrote:
             | Better comparison for Google would be YouTube.
        
               | griomnib wrote:
               | Yes but that's also pre-Sundar Google when there was some
               | semblance of vision. Now that Ruth runs the company
               | behind the scenes with a vision timeline that is measured
               | in exactly 3 month increments...well, good luck.
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | Some of Google's best business units were acquisitions.
             | 
             | YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind,
             | Firebase, HTC (Pixel)
             | 
             | Don't discount Google's M&A game.
        
               | griomnib wrote:
               | They kill more than they allow to live, and doubleclick
               | slowly hollowed out Google search by skewing incentives
               | away from great content to maximizing display revenue via
               | link bait.
               | 
               | Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas's is to
               | Boeing.
        
               | mrpippy wrote:
               | Don't forget Docs (Wordly)
        
               | evilduck wrote:
               | Are any of those from the last decade? They acquired them
               | when they were a different company.
        
             | acdha wrote:
             | Amazon has an okay but underwhelming developer suite. If
             | they bought Gitlab and did nothing other than say that they
             | should have first class support for AWS deployments it'd be
             | a good move, and that's before you consider things like
             | pivoting Gitlab's struggling AI tools to theirs or aligning
             | all of the supply-chain stuff big companies want.
        
               | jonstewart wrote:
               | CodeBuild asks so much and gives so little.
        
               | cmckn wrote:
               | CodeCommit is on the way out, onboarding was disabled
               | over the summer.
               | 
               | https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/how-to-migrate-your-
               | aws-...
        
             | morgante wrote:
             | I wouldn't consign it to the graveyard that quickly.
             | 
             | It's a lot easier/more common for Google to kill internal
             | projects and small acquisitions.
             | 
             | A $16B write-down is far less likely, especially when many
             | Googlers internally realize how much a threat Microsoft is
             | with GitHub + VS Code.
        
           | BadHumans wrote:
           | JetBrains buying it would be out of left field but makes
           | sense in some sense and would be the best possible outcome.
        
             | Macha wrote:
             | I'm not sure if Jetbrains is bigger than I expected or
             | Gitlab smaller, but it feels to me that Jetbrains wouldn't
             | be able to afford Gitlab.
        
               | reaperman wrote:
               | It would be roughly a merger of equals (1-2 billion
               | either direction), and I'm not sure how that could be
               | financed without JetBrains giving up too much control
               | over their own existing company. Perhaps a bank could
               | extend a private loan if they believed in JetBrains
               | ability to use the merger to grow both sides of the
               | merged company.
        
               | vasco wrote:
               | Gitlab is worth $10B on the public market right now
               | without an acquisition premium. You're very far.
        
             | brobdingnagians wrote:
             | Jetbrains decided to go from the Space product to a cut
             | down Space Code product with just code review and git
             | hosting, but then this last week announced they will be
             | shuttering even that next year. I doubt they want to get
             | back into the git hosting, if they did by buying GitLab,
             | that would be odd.
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | I certainly agree that a horrible outcome would be if
           | atlassian or Oracle buys it, but IBM? If IBM acquires and
           | puts it under the red hat umbrella, they have a history of
           | opening up products that were previously more closed.
           | Considering what they did with ansible, for example, would be
           | amazing for gitlab.
        
             | angelaguilera wrote:
             | > If IBM acquires and puts it under the red hat umbrella,
             | they have a history of opening up products that were
             | previously more closed.
             | 
             | As a former CentOS user, I politely disagree with this.
        
               | freedomben wrote:
               | I appreciate the politeness :-)
               | 
               | Good point, red hat is far from perfect. The way they
               | handled cent was incredibly disappointing.
        
           | firesteelrain wrote:
           | Atlassian has their own Cloud offerings and their data center
           | versions of Jira, BitBucket and Confluence are very good.
           | 
           | I don't see GitLab replacing BitBucket.
        
             | acdha wrote:
             | They've been pushing customers to their cloud versions
             | pretty hard and holding back features. Jira and Confluence
             | are decent but BitBucket is like time-traveling back to
             | 2010. We migrated to GitLab with unanimous enthusiasm - so
             | many new features, so many things worked better - and that
             | decision felt better as the years passed where we'd get "is
             | anyone working on this?" updates on the Atlassian tickets
             | for missing BitBucket features which had been years old
             | when I'd voted for them.
        
               | firesteelrain wrote:
               | Our developers want GitLab because it means replacing
               | Bamboo which is an OK product but we have hundreds of
               | build agents that don't scale for on prem. Each agent is
               | a VM running on VMWare. The pipeline's are so much
               | better.
               | 
               | But GitLab price annually for the same amount of users
               | that we have for Bamboo and BitBucket is higher in
               | licensing fees. We have to do things self hosted because
               | of regulatory and compliance reasons.
               | 
               | There is probably a business case to be made for the
               | inefficiency that we see with Bamboo.
               | 
               | BitBucket DC is pretty solid and never goes down. It
               | integrates well with all the other Atlassian products
               | like Jira or Confluence. Our instance is also highly
               | available and fault tolerant.
        
           | TiredOfLife wrote:
           | Jetbrains already has TeamCity and Youtrack
        
             | apocalyptic0n3 wrote:
             | They also had Space (discontinued in May) and Space Code
             | (discontinued last week). I don't think GitLab makes much
             | sense for them
        
           | mrweasel wrote:
           | Why would Google want it? They shutdown Google code and
           | Amazon is shutting down CodeCommit.
           | 
           | I think it would make more sense for a number of companies to
           | invest in Gitlab, to ensure that there is a 3rd. party tool
           | available, as to not "force" users into the hands of Github
           | and Microsoft.
           | 
           | That's probably the best case, Google, Amazon, IBM, JetBrains
           | and a few others create a company, with themselves on the
           | board, and tasks that company with buying and running Gitlab.
           | Having Google alone buy it and you may as well just migrate
           | now pending the inevitable disinterest and shutdown. So I
           | guess that I disagree, Gitlab makes more sense as an
           | independent company, that it does as part of companies that
           | already had failed competing products.
           | 
           | My guess is the ever popular MicroFocus (Now OpenText) who
           | will buy everything that it on the edge of popularity.
        
         | xeonmc wrote:
         | Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was
         | specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to
         | be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before
         | that.         He has no relevant tech experience, except when
         | it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3
         | years.
         | 
         | So he essentially functioned as a company's bill-staples for
         | its assets?
        
         | paulcole wrote:
         | > He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to
         | preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
         | 
         | So other than his relevant experience he has not relevant
         | experience?
        
         | antics wrote:
         | > He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to
         | preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
         | 
         | I think a lot of people would say this is not true. I worked
         | with Bill a little at Microsoft, where he ran an x,000-person
         | engineering org, and my experience was that he was a competent,
         | detail-oriented, product-focused leader. You might disagree
         | but, in any event, running an x,000-person org in a large tech
         | company does qualify you for CEO positions, at least in the
         | eyes of people who make those decisions.
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | Yeah that's pretty relevant tech experience.
           | 
           | Not sure how much more relevant you can get....
        
           | anotheranon867 wrote:
           | He was fired from the same org. Several of his direct reports
           | were also fired. He spent years trying to cover up major
           | mistakes and oversights, and finally got caught red handed
           | without anyone left to scapegoat. It wasn't to an Elizabeth
           | Holmes level, but he wasn't that far away either.
           | 
           | This isn't secondhand either. I witnessed him multiple times
           | telling reports to bury findings, stop research that made the
           | product look bad, and actively prevent anyone from going over
           | his head to higher leadership.
        
         | jbverschoor wrote:
         | That was my immediate thought. Congrats to gitlab
        
         | xyst wrote:
         | What a shame. A literal hatchet man
        
           | rkhleung wrote:
           | Not necessarily. In my experience, getting the right person
           | to prepare a company for an IPO or a sale is hard. Most
           | buyers will do due diligence and besides 'slashing costs' and
           | 'growing the company', there is a skill set for getting
           | governance and compliance practices in place and as well as
           | leading the roadshow for the sale which has some similarities
           | to raising private capital. For instance, if you don't
           | already have explicit policies for workplace safety and
           | environmental practices (e.g. what do you recycle, water
           | usage, etc), you will usually need to put these in place. (We
           | invested in manufacturing and these were extremely important
           | to us). If you are located in multiple jurisdictions, you
           | need to be ready to demonstrate that you are in compliance
           | with local regulations and pass the equivalent of
           | "integration tests", prove you are in compliance across
           | multiple jurisdictions where their rules may differ or seem
           | to conflict. The CEO knows what needs to get done and has the
           | rolodex to get the people to help the company get these
           | things done for a sale because he has done this several times
           | before and understands the things that can go wrong.
        
       | hipadev23 wrote:
       | What does Gitlab do. And why are they publicly traded?
        
         | mch82 wrote:
         | https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/gitlab
         | 
         | The team that runs this Hacker News comment site also invests
         | in startups from time to time. GitLab did pretty well.
         | 
         | :-)
        
       | blastonico wrote:
       | He's going to find out that being a Staples is harder than it
       | looooks.
        
       | tuananh wrote:
       | - Previously in 2017, Bill Staples was brought in Marketo for the
       | sole purpose of prepping the company before selling. 2018,
       | Marketo was acquired by Adobe.
       | 
       | - 2021, Bill becomes CEO of NewRelic. 2023, NewRelic was
       | acquired.
       | 
       | I'm seeing a pattern here.
        
         | csunbird wrote:
         | > Adobe announced that it's acquiring Marketo, a company that
         | sells marketing software, from Vista Equity Partners for $4.75
         | billion
         | 
         | > New Relic to be Acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG for
         | $6.5 Billion
         | 
         | Sounds like he is good salesman, the numbers are quite good.
        
       | righthand wrote:
       | Glad I got out years ago after the price dropped and never
       | recovered. Going public was not good for consumers or investors.
        
         | tombert wrote:
         | Yeah, I am still holding onto my couple shares. I am down about
         | $98, and if this is just a bit to get acquired, I suspect
         | they're going to force me to sell my shares at their current
         | price.
        
       | kevinsync wrote:
       | I always liked Gitlab a lot better than Github, and I can't even
       | pinpoint exactly why. Just something about the tactility of it,
       | the ~ _-vibes-_ ~ ..
       | 
       | I also bought some stock a while back because I liked the product
       | -- praise Jah if they all make out like bandits if it sells, I
       | just hope the new owner doesn't let the product shit the bed.
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | The cost of maintainance a Rails app is huge, due to dynamic
       | typings.
        
       | RainyDayTmrw wrote:
       | I'm pessimistic about GitLab, given the state and trajectory of
       | GitLab CI, which should be a core product for them. It's not in a
       | good place, and it's not receiving the attention it needs, for
       | being a core part of their platform. Being required to use GitLab
       | CI causes me pain and frustration on a daily basis.
       | 
       | If the other commenters are correct that the new CEO has a track
       | record of pursuing private equity type acquisitions, then I fear
       | GitLab CI is destined to become the next Travis CI.
        
         | datenhorst wrote:
         | Can I ask what specific pain points you have with Gitlab CI?
         | I've been using it extensively the last couple of years and all
         | in all it's been a pretty smooth experience!
        
         | cyberpunk wrote:
         | Wow having gone from gitlab to gh actions I miss gitlab ci
         | massively.
         | 
         | GitHub actions still aren't k8s native, you actually have to
         | install docker on your "runners" like it's the year 2010.
         | Pitiful.
        
       | anotheranon867 wrote:
       | Anon for reasons. I worked with Bill at Microsoft. Bill was fired
       | from Microsoft along with most of his cronies who almost managed
       | to completely tank Azure.
       | 
       | He is the guy responsible for the absolute train wreck that was
       | the Azure portal v2 (post silver light) and v3 (Ibiza). He lied
       | to Scott Guthrie, buried efforts to benchmark or in any way
       | measure CSAT or usability, and stabbed many many people in the
       | back.
       | 
       | Dude was also borderline incompetent.
       | 
       | His partner and buddy in the whole fraud was Jonah Sterling who
       | managed to continue to get promoted and is one of the top design
       | leaders at Microsoft despite having zero UX/UI/Interaction skills
       | or knowledge and costing Microsoft years of wasted effort and
       | ruining many design careers by overpromoting his directs to boost
       | his own career trajectory.
       | 
       | After working with so many Microsoft execs who were either
       | astoundingly incompetent or downright malicious people - it
       | saddens me every time I see another one get named to a csuite of
       | another company.
        
         | corytheboyd wrote:
         | It's a big club, and you ain't in it!
        
       | MiggiV2 wrote:
       | I'm eager to see how this unfolds, and I'm hoping for the best
       | for Bill.
        
       | fosefx wrote:
       | Aside: What makes Gitlab "AI-powered"?
        
         | Cupprum wrote:
         | The press release is not that long, but it contains "AI-powered
         | DevSecOps platform" 4 times :D so its just a buzzword.
        
         | _joel wrote:
         | They've got a copliot like code suggestions thingy.
        
       | _joel wrote:
       | I've found Gitlab to be quite flaky these past few months. I hope
       | they concentrate on fixing things rather than getting ready to
       | sell, but I won't hold my breath.
        
       | andy_ppp wrote:
       | I wish Gitlab would spend more time thinking through the best way
       | to do things rather than just adding as many features as they
       | can. From what I've seen (my usage of both products) they don't
       | have a single feature that works as well as GitHub even though
       | they probably have feature parity in theory.
        
       | seeksky wrote:
       | What about gitlab now
        
       | acuozzo wrote:
       | Unfortunately, nominative determinism did _not_ strike again in
       | this case. Boo.
        
       | Vosporos wrote:
       | Ah well fuck, looks like some projects will have to move to
       | Forgejo
        
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