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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Yeah, I tried to separate the two statements but I guess it wasn't clear. I'm not saying he was pushed out and they used the cancer as an excuse.
I was saying the choice of a business-focused replacement with a track record of prepping companies for acquisition (vs say getting someone internal or with a more engineering track record) is a sign of changing direction, however.
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.
While I haven't been directly involved in the negotiations, at three separate companies the internal comments indicated that what they were quoted for GitHub Enterprise Server pricing was just not in the same universe as Gitlab EE.
One migrated from Github Enterprise Server explicitly as a cost saving measure. One migrated from Bitbucket Server because the writing seemed very much on the wall for Atlassian's self-hosted solution with the Jira pricing model change and a trial migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud had gone so badly the whole thing was called off (though they did pay up for JIRA Data Center, JIRA was deemed less replaceable than Bitbucket apparently). The last went from Gitlab CE to Gitlab EE, so maybe there wasn't the hardest investigation of alternatives on that one, but they did at least claim they looked at Github Enterprise server as an alternative.
Now none of these companies used Exchange, Azure, Office, Teams, etc. etc. so maybe there's a bunch more discounts and synergy if you're fully bought into the MS ecosystem
We can see looking at both websites that GitHub is drastically cheaper on paper alone when it comes to enterprise. GitLab would have to be undercutting their premium offering by almost a third of the price to match GitHub which seems doubtful even if you have something like a volume discount.
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.
> 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).
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)…
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.
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.
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.
GitLab CI can suppress the checkout altogether, do stuff, and then trigger a downstream job.
But really that’s emblematic of the whole thing, where some particular workflow is possible but extremely awkward and hacky. You feel like you’re fighting the system and wish you were just writing whatever it is as a few lines of groovy in a Jenkinsfile.
With great power comes great responsibility, and the responsibility to maintain what started out as “a few lines of groovy” is not one I’d ever take up again.
There’s a middle ground between overly flexible and very constrained, and I think GitHub actions nails that.
Individual steps/actions are reusable components with clear interfaces, which is tied together by a simple workflow engine. This decoupling is great, and allows independent evolution.
As a point to this: GitHub actions doesn’t even offer git clone functionality: it doesn’t care about it. Everyone uses the core “GitHub/checkout” action, but there is nothing special about it.
The same for caching - the workflow/steps engine doesn’t give two shits about that. The end result of this decoupling is things like sccache and docker can offer native integrations with the cache system, because it’s a separate thing.
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.
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.
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.
- 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 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.
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.
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!
* Doesn't scale. In many places. In particular, GitLab CI is required to use GitLab's Gitaly for Git replication. Gitaly has architectural limitations on throughput, which are surprisingly easy to hit with even a medium sized team. Certain otherwise reasonable patterns, particularly child pipelines, cause severe load amplification with Gitaly.
* Bad error handling. Ruby errors leak through. Although the underlying error is my user error, returning it to me as an underlying Ruby exception is really unhelpful. It basically shows that they didn't validate inputs at all. The input is trusted, so it's probably not a security issue, but it's a huge usability and developer experience issue.
* Config format is weird and deficient. Surprisingly difficult to programmatically generate. Can't generate new jobs into the current pipeline. Must generate child pipelines. See above for the load amplification issue therein.
Yeah - and as a result of that, the builds I do for .NET in GitHub Actions are an order of magnitude quicker to run than the previous pipelines I had in GitLab, where everything was painfully slow because it all ran inside Docker.
I get the point about it not being ideal for self-hosted runners, not having ephemeral storage etc. But I disagree that the hosted GitHub Actions runners don't provide a good experience. If your build needs it - e.g. you're building something to deploy to your K8s cluster, use your Dockerfile and build in Docker. If you just want to compile some code, what's the point?
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
Git repositories are hash trees. The distributed nature of git is a bit different but it shares similiarities. Definitly has the crypto checkmarks ticked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
I'm pretty sure of the same, and that feature actually leaks into the implementation. Right after the initial introduction of the current Github Actions, we translated some Azure Devops scripts to Actions and a lot of the structure and most keywords where nearly identical. As well as the interface when running the CI.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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
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 .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ah wow, my apologies. I didn’t realize it was publicly traded! I used very inappropriate sources for that valuation…most likely super outdated without realizing it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
50/50 chance to generate one looking directly at the camera, or one in ¾ view where one hand is holding a microphone with the other palm extended toward unseen audience.
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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.
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