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GitLab acquires Gitter, will open-source the code

deleted 10y ago
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brandnewlow 10y ago
I'm a member of a Gitter for a smart mirror project. It's been a fun way to connect with other fans of the project and the maintainers. Feels like a smart move.
- sytse 10y ago
  Thanks Brad, glad to hear you like the move.
Dangeranger 10y ago
This seems like a good match. I've been helping some early coders in the FreeCodeCamp Gitter and have been impressed with the quality of the app for a company with little capital. They have done a lot with short resources. It would be better in my opinion for small Slack communities to transition to Gitter since Slack has said they do not plan to support large scale free communities in the long term. edit; typo
- suprememoocow 10y ago
  Thank you Dangeranger! FreeCodeCamp is an incredible community and we've been glad to be able to support them in doing the amazing work that they're doing. Hopefully this announcement will help them go from strength to strength!
alpb 10y ago
Can mods fix the link please, it's currently 404.
- iheart2code 10y ago
  Blog post seems to be taken down. Here's a cached version. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ7eAAJ:blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ...
- narsil 10y ago
  The page appears to have been taken down. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ7eAAJ:blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaA...
- wyldfire 10y ago
  Perhaps this was a premature disclosure of the acquisition? Is an 8-K filing required for privately held companies?
  - piker 10y ago
    No
    - yuhong 10y ago
      But yea, one of my favorite topics is the NDA.
- new299 10y ago
  The blog post appears to have been deleted. There's also nothing on the Github blog. Maybe they released the post sooner that they had wanted to?
- dang 10y ago
  Sure thing.
iplaw 10y ago
Looks like the Gitlab v. Github battle rages on.
caio1982 10y ago
"Next piece of wow: we will be open sourcing all of the Gitter" The Gitlab folks really know how to do it. It is of course the rational approach to it, but still, that's a bold move.
- nerdponx 10y ago
  Do we know what protocol Gitter runs on top of?
  - zbuttram 10y ago
    Protocol? I kind of assumed things like Slack, Gitter, etc. were just using websockets that communicate with their backend.
    - Duhck 10y ago
      Slack is built on top of IRC. Presumably Gitter is as well
      - edoceo 10y ago
        Not on top of IRC. Just similar in that they are both chat like
      - detaro 10y ago
        > Slack is built on top of IRC Source? First time I hear that, and it seems unlikely, since they have quite a few features that don't fit nicely in stock IRC.
        kuschku 10y ago
        I’m not sure there are any Slack features that don’t fit into stock IRC v3. Basically everything they do is already supported or a draft. (Now just everyone has to implement it)
        10y ago
romanovcode 10y ago
This leads to 404. Their official blog says nothing about it (http://blog.gitter.im/ http://blog.gitter.im/) and Twitter also says nothing about it (https://twitter.com/gitchat https://twitter.com/gitchat).
- haldean 10y ago
  It's up now at http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
- jonknee 10y ago
  I just read it a couple of minutes ago, maybe the announcement was posted early?
  - romanovcode 10y ago
    Probably. Who ever did push the "Publish" button is probably biting his nails :)
    - jonknee 10y ago
      Luckily GitLab can't get too angry about someone pressing the wrong button...
    - timanglade 10y ago
      In this case we didn’t even press “Publish” :) The original link was just a preview link that was shared internally so people could review the announcement. Unfortunately someone received it without proper context, didn’t realize it was a draft/preview link, and thought it was ready to share.
  - spike021 10y ago
    Probably. There are grammar errors (or at least one) in the cached copy that was linked elsewhere.
- marcinkuzminski 10y ago
Philipp__ 10y ago
Every next move by Gitlab makes them grow in my eyes, personaly. Few weeks ago I started using it as my main "portfolio", it's not much but I really like their way of thinking, openness and providing services. Their whole eco-system is looking really interesting right now, and I hope they will continue to advance and grow. Edits: typos, wrote from phone.
- deleted 10y ago
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- oblio 10y ago
  They definitely have a very interesting strategy, one that is well suited to their target market (= programmers). They're probably the most open company I've seen. Still, I can't justify moving off GitHub, for now. Gitlab has some growing left to do, especially on the SaaS part. Still, good luck to them :-)
  - LeFever 10y ago
    Having never used GitLab, what do you mean by growing from a SaaS perspective?
    - j_s 10y ago
      Performance of repos on GitLab.com https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
      - sytse 10y ago
        We hear you and agree, GitLab.com is too slow. We're working on multiple things to improve it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 GitLab 9.1 will have lots of performance improvements for database queries. The GItaly team is working hard to move git commands to the fileservers to reduce latency, that will happen in about a month from now.
securingsincity 10y ago
I hope this spurns more OSS communities to move to gitter. As much as I enjoy slack, limits on features like search and invites creates a friction that I think a service like gitter can help solve.
- notacoward 10y ago
  s/spurns/spurs/ Not trying to be snarky. Maybe it was a typo, but non-English speakers might not immediately get from that to the correct word.
- lol768 10y ago
  Personally the fragmentation of these random chat services does little to make me want to get involved in project chat discussions. I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.
  - Perihelion 10y ago
    Totally agree with this. Having to join 10+ Slack-like groups to collaborate on open source projects is unrealistic for me. As a result, I don't frequent some projects' chats and stick to bug trackers/mailing lists -- as a result of that I miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes with contributing to open source. I've missed out on a few conversations where decisions were made too. Being in multiple groups on these services is a huge pain point for me, whereas being on multiple IRC servers in multiple channels is far less invasive to my time and computer resources ;D. I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone use IRC for everything, but it seems like a lot of us had standardized on IRC for OSS before most of these services came along. Also I'm salty that most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools which are both things I've leaned on heavily when working with communities. That's probably a rant for another day, but it's related to why I really dislike using some of these things. This might just be my perception, but it seems like most people I come across in this field were on IRC at some point.
slg 10y ago
Does anyone have an insight into the differences between Slack, Mattermost, and Gitter? I have only ever used Slack before but it seems like Gitlab is already heavily invested with Mattermost. That makes me wonder what the future looks like for both Mattermost and Gitter. Are they different enough that they can both coexist without hurting either product or is one of them destined to be folded into the other in hopes of taking on Slack more directly?
- detaro 10y ago
  Gitter is targeted at providing a public channel around a project, Mattermost is more Slack-like for team-internal organisation (with multiple channels, user management etc)
  - Infernal 10y ago
    Thanks - haven't heard of Gitter, came to the comments to ask about the potential impact to Mattermost. Sounds like there's room for these two to coexist within GitLab.
- mynewtb 10y ago
  They mention those in http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
- agibsonccc 10y ago
  We chose gitter over slack as an open core company. I close leads, hire engineers, and run our team chat all on one platform. (We supplement this with hangouts) . The idea that all of my activity and communications can happen on one platform is pretty appealing. We also don't need many features (aside from better search please!)
- it33 10y ago
  Mattermost is for self-hosted communication. E.g. automated deploy to your cloud account, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=83s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=83s Here's a blog post on differences with Mattermost and Slack: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...
mkurz 10y ago
Would be interesting to know how much they paid
dewiz 10y ago
next, I hope to see some "content" offer attached to gitlab's ecosystem, for instance a strong collaboration with stackoverflow/OSQA
- suprememoocow 10y ago
  Gitter has been working on a content system called Topics. https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/topics https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/topics. It's still in Beta, but Q&A and structured content is definitely something that - in addition to chat - we think is important. (edit: typo)
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    That's really awesome! Does it run like a mailing list system? One of the #1 pain points in running FOSS projects is creating and managing a mailing list, with archive browsing that doesn't look atrocious.
  - dewiz 10y ago
    very interesting, the UI throws me off though, for instance are topics somehow correlated to the channels I have open (i.e. the list on the left)? Can I access Topics from the desktop client? Looking forward to updates, thanks!
- pietroalbini 10y ago
  I guess you can remove OSQA from that list. It's now abandoned, with no new commits and the developers strongly encouraging to use their commercial offering... I'm currently in the processor of migrating an OSQA site to AskBot, which seems currently maintained.
  - dewiz 10y ago
    too bad, thanks for the heads up
timanglade 10y ago
Tim, Marketing at GitLab here. Sorry for the false start, a draft leaked out via Twitter but the announcement was scheduled to run at 10 Pacific. You can read Gitter’s post: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ And here is what VentureBeat had to say about the news: http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-chat-startup-gitter-will-open-source-the-code/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-c... UPDATE: and here is GitLab’s post with a few more details: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/
- deleted 10y ago
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- deleted 10y ago
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jordanmoconnor 10y ago
Confirmed on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/842058103571001344 https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/842058103571001344 Link to the live post: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
- orb_yt 10y ago
  Looks like they will open source the whole thing. I'd be very interested in learning how much Gitlab paid for this acquisition.
  - sytse 10y ago
    I'm sorry but we don't comment on acquisitions prices. Being transparent about it is not common in the industry and us doing this by default might make future acquisitions harder since the company being acquired might not like it. Also see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/general-guidelines/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/general-guidelines/ "Most things are public unless there is a reason not to. Not public by default are: financial and legal information"
    - yuhong 10y ago
      I think even public companies often disclose the prices though, especially for major ones. This being said, I have been thinking about the GitLab IPO, including things like fixing Reg FD for a while now.
      - dragonwriter 10y ago
        > I think even public companies often disclose the prices though, "Even public companies"? Public companies are required to report a lot of financial information publicly that non-public companies are neither required to report nor in the habit of reporting.
        yuhong 10y ago
orsenthil 10y ago
The blog post is now up: http://blog.gitter.im/ http://blog.gitter.im/
ausjke 10y ago
thought gitter is part of github, what an ignorance.
dang 10y ago
Url changed from http://blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/ http://blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03..., which disappeared.
- sytse 10y ago
  Thanks Daniel, sorry for circulating a draft post early.
rjain15 10y ago
What is the use of Gitter with Gitlab, in the post-slack world?
realPubkey 10y ago
Maybe we can then fix all the UI-bugs in gitter which pissed me on so often.
ohstopitu 10y ago
I love Gitlab but sadly, quite a lot of services that offer free accounts for open source projects (TravisCI comes to mind), generally don't integrate with Gitlab It's one of the few reasons why I am still using Github :( .
- LyndsySimon 10y ago
  I've yet to find something I needed that wasn't supported - or that there wasn't a better option available that did support it. TravisCI for instance, is easily replaced in all of my projects with Gitlab's integrated CI.
  - FooBarWidget 10y ago
    I feel this way too. Not specifically about travis but about providing github integration as the only option Git is supposed to be distributed! How hard is it to ask people to provide a git url and tell them to push events to a webhook?
- OJFord 10y ago
  > I love Gitlab but sadly, quite a lot of services that offer free accounts for open source projects (TravisCI comes to mind) Isn't there a "but sadly I don't love its CI" missing from the middle of this? Why is Travis the problem?
- jobvandervoort 10y ago
  Let us know what projects you miss seeing integrated with GitLab and we'll try our best to convince them, help them in any way to make sure it happens! As other point out, you should be able to use GitLab CI instead of Travis, they configure very similarly. That said, I'd welcome them integrating fully with us as well.
  - ohstopitu 10y ago
    I've used Gitlab CI before and I do like it, but TravisCI allowed for some granular control that Gitlab CI does not have (or that I am doing wrong) - for example, ability to run specific tests in case of pull/merge requests (TrasisCI has an environment variable for it). As for other projects - the most important one for me was clubhouse.io (Gitlab Issues is great but just not as good as clubhouse.io)
simplehuman 10y ago
This appears more like a acqui-hire. Also, since mattermost is bundled as part of GitLab, it makes me wonder why they didn't acquire mattermost instead. This is good though because mattermost is open-source only on paper. They refuse to integrate important features even when people contribute code (to protect their commercial version). Third, people see GitLab as GitHub competitor. But really it competes with Atlassian.
- it33 10y ago
  Hi @simplehuman, Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention. First, we love GitLab. While we'd be flattered with an offer to join them, Mattermost has its own mission and motivation (https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-so...) Second, regarding community contributions, we have an open and transparent process for proposing, discussing and vetting contributions before a pull request is made (https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/contribution-guide.html https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/contribution-guide.htm...). When people don't follow the guidelines, and when they work hard to contribute something before engaging with the broader community--especially when it totally works but can't be officially accepted--we feel terrible. Recent example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/5718 https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/5718 Previous related example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/2718 https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/2718 You can follow the links there to go into detailed, heated discussions around this in our own Mattermost instance. In our manifesto, we lay out the purpose of the open source Mattermost Team Edition, and about the commercial Enterprise Edition (https://www.mattermost.org/manifesto/ https://www.mattermost.org/manifesto/), and--at least in my mind--our decisions are based on scope (What purpose does X serve? Where should it belong, if at all)? Our contribution guidelines are in our docs, they're in our developer docs, they're displayed to contributors before they can submit a merge request, and yet with the size of our community, we still have mistakes and awkward threads. I hope we can do better here. If anyone would like to discuss, you're welcome to join our community server: https://pre-release.mattermost.com/ https://pre-release.mattermost.com/ Third, yes, agree, GitLab is certainly competing with Atlassian, and winning a lot.
- deleted 10y ago
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catshirt 10y ago
i was just hating on GitLab here a few days ago so i will take the opportunity to say this is really cool on a bunch of levels.
dorianm 10y ago
Think about your favorite github repo, or even just a very specific one, and there is always a few people talking about this repo: https://gitter.im/rails/rails https://gitter.im/rails/rails
yani 10y ago
That is awesome news. I have been using Gitlab for the last year. I switched over my personal projects and 3 organizations I was advicing from GitHub. They won me with their data centers in Asia and Europe. GitHub is extremely slow in Asia and they do not want to change.
sandGorgon 10y ago
@sytse - this is huge. You can move the YC internal slack to gitter as well ;) But seriously - people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter - especially after https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.ki286cqbu https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w... Look at the number of people begging Discord to take money from them - https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/12454674-discord-as-a-replacement-to-slack-for-developers https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-... gitter always had search working - discord just got it recently.
- orb_yt 10y ago
  > people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter Isn't that just Slack?
  - shadowfacts 10y ago
    The point of the first link is that free Gitter is already better than free Slack, so companies would be willing pay to have guaranteed support/uptime/etc from Gitter.
- sytse 10y ago
  Thanks Sandeep. We assume that it is easier to charge money to enterprises than open source communities. If we see strong adoption and feature requests from the enterprise we'll consider adopting an open-core model and charging for it. For now the adoption is mainly from open source communities and we think of our costs as a marketing expense. Do you know of any enterprises using Gitter?
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    No - because, like discord, gitter makes it a point to make privacy very hard to set up. This is fairly deliberate and is the reason why enterprises have a hard time adopting it.
    - 10y ago
hamandcheese 10y ago
Somewhat off topic, but I was once very interested in working for GitLab. According to their compensation calculator, though, I'd be making less than half what I make now (also working remotely). They ding me for living in a comparatively low cost area. I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalized talent pool.
- kilroy123 10y ago
  I'm also turned off by remote companies that do the same. I work remote and moved to a very low-cost area. That doesn't mean I want a massive pay cut.
  - duncan_bayne 10y ago
    "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a bad principle to run both countries and companies.
    - Yahivin 10y ago
      Why should we run countries like companies?
      - Ellahn 10y ago
        That was never said, we obviously shouldn't. Finding something that applies to both (Or in this case something that works in neither, which makes it even clearer) is not the same as treating both as requiring the same solutions.
  - usrusr 10y ago
    I guess if you are a remote friendly employer, you'd want to avoid both cutting yourself off from talent that happens to live in a high-cost area and getting completely overrun by applications from low-cost areas. And that could be reason enough even before applying the most obvious rule of acquisition, "don't pay more than you need". But yeah, the outcome, remoters from Cheaptown effectively subsidizing their coworkers from Glitter City is incredibly ugly. One should at least hope that the decisionmaking processes at the employer do not completely isolate the one deciding on a hire from the cost difference, so that flyover guy could at least enjoy an increased chance of getting the job.
nxrabl 10y ago
Discussion at: https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter The goal seems to be to have the code open sourced by this June, with all history included. Stack details here: https://stackshare.io/gitter/gitter https://stackshare.io/gitter/gitter
systemfreund 10y ago
When it's going to be open sourced then we could finally implement a proper matrix.org bridge. Currently all messages are relayed through a special gitter user called matrixbot
- Arathorn 10y ago
  matrix-appservice-gitter actually supports 'puppeting' already - letting you log in as your own user. But native Matrix support for Gitter would be incredible!
m0sa 10y ago
`git pull gitter`
- connorshea 10y ago
  More like `git merge gitter` :)
dantrevino 10y ago
great news!
dantrevino 10y ago
great news
radarsat1 10y ago
What the heck is Gitter? A public chat service? Sounds like adding yet a new way for people to bug you about things that don't work, but without the controlled discussion of opening a proper Issue. As a developer or maintainer, what value does this bring to a project?
- kzisme 10y ago
  It ties chats to Github repos/issues. I've never had any luck with clicking on one. IRC is much more useful in my opinion. I suppose they could make it work in some fashion, but opening an issue should suffice...
DeepAndDark 10y ago
I hope the search in gitter-chanels gets better now, cause of open-sourcing it. There are good infos and tips hidden. Maybe tags or upvotes would solve this.
omouse 10y ago
Hah, nice. Love it, love it that a whole business can run on free/open source and selling hosting/support.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
So the race to acquire the next team dev solution heats up. Slack + github + trello equivalent
- sdesol 10y ago
  From what I've read so far, I get the impression, Gitter was purchased solely for marketing value. And in a lot of ways, is quite ingenious. I would suspect, 80% if not more of the discussions that occurs on Gitter, revolves around repos that are hosted on GitHub. By tapping into those conversations, they'll probably be better able to identify GitHub pain points and provide subtle hints and nudges, for Gitter users to consider GitLab.com
marknadal 10y ago
Congrats to the gitter team, you guys are awesome and have a way (far far superior) product than slack.
gregjw 10y ago
Solidly great business decision, well done.
erlend_sh 10y ago
This is pretty weird to me: > What about Mattermost, how is this different? > Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience. > Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication. Surely GitLab would be better off investing fully into a single chat-platform? The road to making Gitter good for internal team communication is not particularly long or windy.
nico 10y ago
Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com). However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering). Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV). Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.
- sytse 10y ago
  Hi Nico, I'm sorry that you suffered our unreliability this week. We do try to update @gitlabstatus for everything that we see happening, no matter how small. We're determined to make GitLab.com a reliable platform, but we realize we still have a long way to go.
  - nico 10y ago
    Thank you. I'm still a big fan of Gitlab and the vision you guys have. You've built an amazing organization and you'll definitely keep doing great things. Look forward to using your platform again in the future :)
    - sytse 10y ago
      Thanks Nico, glad to hear that you'll give us another chance.
- YorickPeterse 10y ago
kureikain 10y ago
I really like Gitlab and this acquiring. When I firsted started as a developer, I don't know how people do thing in real production. I don't know how real company build real software. Nowsaday, with all open source thing from real company that acquire/shutdown I can finally learn a lots from them. Recently Stajoy open source everything, now Gitter is next. I'm sure I will learn a lot by consume the real code that run on production. Thank you Gitlab/Gitter.
itchyjunk 10y ago
Have used gitter a few times. I've heard it lacks moderator tolls from the channel owners a few times. OpenAI has their channel there too.
sherpajack 10y ago
So somewhat eerily, my Gitter GitHub public repo authorization token shows that it was accessed within the past 2 days, despite my not having logged in to any Gitter pages in months. http://imgur.com/a/aABi8 http://imgur.com/a/aABi8

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

I'm a member of a Gitter for a smart mirror project. It's been a fun way to connect with other fans of the project and the maintainers. Feels like a smart move.

sytse 10y ago
Thanks Brad, glad to hear you like the move.

Dangeranger 10y ago

This seems like a good match. I've been helping some early coders in the FreeCodeCamp Gitter and have been impressed with the quality of the app for a company with little capital. They have done a lot with short resources. It would be better in my opinion for small Slack communities to transition to Gitter since Slack has said they do not plan to support large scale free communities in the long term. edit; typo

suprememoocow 10y ago
Thank you Dangeranger! FreeCodeCamp is an incredible community and we've been glad to be able to support them in doing the amazing work that they're doing. Hopefully this announcement will help them go from strength to strength!

alpb 10y ago

Can mods fix the link please, it's currently 404.

iheart2code 10y ago
Blog post seems to be taken down. Here's a cached version. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ7eAAJ:blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ...
narsil 10y ago
The page appears to have been taken down. Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaAJ7eAAJ:blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:XWzfaA...
wyldfire 10y ago
Perhaps this was a premature disclosure of the acquisition? Is an 8-K filing required for privately held companies?
- piker 10y ago
  No
  - yuhong 10y ago
    But yea, one of my favorite topics is the NDA.
new299 10y ago
The blog post appears to have been deleted. There's also nothing on the Github blog. Maybe they released the post sooner that they had wanted to?
dang 10y ago
Sure thing.

iplaw 10y ago

Looks like the Gitlab v. Github battle rages on.

caio1982 10y ago

"Next piece of wow: we will be open sourcing all of the Gitter" The Gitlab folks really know how to do it. It is of course the rational approach to it, but still, that's a bold move.

nerdponx 10y ago
Do we know what protocol Gitter runs on top of?
- zbuttram 10y ago
  Protocol? I kind of assumed things like Slack, Gitter, etc. were just using websockets that communicate with their backend.
  - Duhck 10y ago
    Slack is built on top of IRC. Presumably Gitter is as well
    - edoceo 10y ago
      Not on top of IRC. Just similar in that they are both chat like
    - detaro 10y ago
      > Slack is built on top of IRC Source? First time I hear that, and it seems unlikely, since they have quite a few features that don't fit nicely in stock IRC.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        I’m not sure there are any Slack features that don’t fit into stock IRC v3. Basically everything they do is already supported or a draft. (Now just everyone has to implement it)
        10y ago

romanovcode 10y ago

This leads to 404. Their official blog says nothing about it (http://blog.gitter.im/ http://blog.gitter.im/) and Twitter also says nothing about it (https://twitter.com/gitchat https://twitter.com/gitchat).

haldean 10y ago
It's up now at http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
jonknee 10y ago
I just read it a couple of minutes ago, maybe the announcement was posted early?
- romanovcode 10y ago
  Probably. Who ever did push the "Publish" button is probably biting his nails :)
  - jonknee 10y ago
    Luckily GitLab can't get too angry about someone pressing the wrong button...
  - timanglade 10y ago
    In this case we didn’t even press “Publish” :) The original link was just a preview link that was shared internally so people could review the announcement. Unfortunately someone received it without proper context, didn’t realize it was a draft/preview link, and thought it was ready to share.
- spike021 10y ago
  Probably. There are grammar errors (or at least one) in the cached copy that was linked elsewhere.
marcinkuzminski 10y ago

Philipp__ 10y ago

Every next move by Gitlab makes them grow in my eyes, personaly. Few weeks ago I started using it as my main "portfolio", it's not much but I really like their way of thinking, openness and providing services. Their whole eco-system is looking really interesting right now, and I hope they will continue to advance and grow. Edits: typos, wrote from phone.

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oblio 10y ago
They definitely have a very interesting strategy, one that is well suited to their target market (= programmers). They're probably the most open company I've seen. Still, I can't justify moving off GitHub, for now. Gitlab has some growing left to do, especially on the SaaS part. Still, good luck to them :-)
- LeFever 10y ago
  Having never used GitLab, what do you mean by growing from a SaaS perspective?
  - j_s 10y ago
    Performance of repos on GitLab.com https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
    - sytse 10y ago
      We hear you and agree, GitLab.com is too slow. We're working on multiple things to improve it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 GitLab 9.1 will have lots of performance improvements for database queries. The GItaly team is working hard to move git commands to the fileservers to reduce latency, that will happen in about a month from now.

securingsincity 10y ago

I hope this spurns more OSS communities to move to gitter. As much as I enjoy slack, limits on features like search and invites creates a friction that I think a service like gitter can help solve.

notacoward 10y ago
s/spurns/spurs/ Not trying to be snarky. Maybe it was a typo, but non-English speakers might not immediately get from that to the correct word.
lol768 10y ago
Personally the fragmentation of these random chat services does little to make me want to get involved in project chat discussions. I wish project maintainers would stick to a network like freenode and just occupy a channel there dedicated to the project. I'm already set-up to take part in discussions there, I don't need to use a web browser etc.
- Perihelion 10y ago
  Totally agree with this. Having to join 10+ Slack-like groups to collaborate on open source projects is unrealistic for me. As a result, I don't frequent some projects' chats and stick to bug trackers/mailing lists -- as a result of that I miss out on a lot of the camaraderie that comes with contributing to open source. I've missed out on a few conversations where decisions were made too. Being in multiple groups on these services is a huge pain point for me, whereas being on multiple IRC servers in multiple channels is far less invasive to my time and computer resources ;D. I'm not necessarily advocating that everyone use IRC for everything, but it seems like a lot of us had standardized on IRC for OSS before most of these services came along. Also I'm salty that most of these Slack-like services have no ignore feature/minimal moderation tools which are both things I've leaned on heavily when working with communities. That's probably a rant for another day, but it's related to why I really dislike using some of these things. This might just be my perception, but it seems like most people I come across in this field were on IRC at some point.

slg 10y ago

Does anyone have an insight into the differences between Slack, Mattermost, and Gitter? I have only ever used Slack before but it seems like Gitlab is already heavily invested with Mattermost. That makes me wonder what the future looks like for both Mattermost and Gitter. Are they different enough that they can both coexist without hurting either product or is one of them destined to be folded into the other in hopes of taking on Slack more directly?

detaro 10y ago
Gitter is targeted at providing a public channel around a project, Mattermost is more Slack-like for team-internal organisation (with multiple channels, user management etc)
- Infernal 10y ago
  Thanks - haven't heard of Gitter, came to the comments to ask about the potential impact to Mattermost. Sounds like there's room for these two to coexist within GitLab.
mynewtb 10y ago
They mention those in http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/
agibsonccc 10y ago
We chose gitter over slack as an open core company. I close leads, hire engineers, and run our team chat all on one platform. (We supplement this with hangouts) . The idea that all of my activity and communications can happen on one platform is pretty appealing. We also don't need many features (aside from better search please!)
it33 10y ago
Mattermost is for self-hosted communication. E.g. automated deploy to your cloud account, etc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=83s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=83s Here's a blog post on differences with Mattermost and Slack: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-open-source-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...

mkurz 10y ago

Would be interesting to know how much they paid

dewiz 10y ago

next, I hope to see some "content" offer attached to gitlab's ecosystem, for instance a strong collaboration with stackoverflow/OSQA

suprememoocow 10y ago
Gitter has been working on a content system called Topics. https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/topics https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/topics. It's still in Beta, but Q&A and structured content is definitely something that - in addition to chat - we think is important. (edit: typo)
- scrollaway 10y ago
  That's really awesome! Does it run like a mailing list system? One of the #1 pain points in running FOSS projects is creating and managing a mailing list, with archive browsing that doesn't look atrocious.
- dewiz 10y ago
  very interesting, the UI throws me off though, for instance are topics somehow correlated to the channels I have open (i.e. the list on the left)? Can I access Topics from the desktop client? Looking forward to updates, thanks!
pietroalbini 10y ago
I guess you can remove OSQA from that list. It's now abandoned, with no new commits and the developers strongly encouraging to use their commercial offering... I'm currently in the processor of migrating an OSQA site to AskBot, which seems currently maintained.
- dewiz 10y ago
  too bad, thanks for the heads up

timanglade 10y ago

Tim, Marketing at GitLab here. Sorry for the false start, a draft leaked out via Twitter but the announcement was scheduled to run at 10 Pacific. You can read Gitter’s post: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ And here is what VentureBeat had to say about the news: http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-chat-startup-gitter-will-open-source-the-code/ http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/15/gitlab-acquires-software-c... UPDATE: and here is GitLab’s post with a few more details: https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/

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jordanmoconnor 10y ago

Confirmed on Twitter: https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/842058103571001344 https://twitter.com/gitchat/status/842058103571001344 Link to the live post: http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/ http://blog.gitter.im/2017/03/15/gitter-gitlab-acquisition/

orb_yt 10y ago
Looks like they will open source the whole thing. I'd be very interested in learning how much Gitlab paid for this acquisition.
- sytse 10y ago
  I'm sorry but we don't comment on acquisitions prices. Being transparent about it is not common in the industry and us doing this by default might make future acquisitions harder since the company being acquired might not like it. Also see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/general-guidelines/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/general-guidelines/ "Most things are public unless there is a reason not to. Not public by default are: financial and legal information"
  - yuhong 10y ago
    I think even public companies often disclose the prices though, especially for major ones. This being said, I have been thinking about the GitLab IPO, including things like fixing Reg FD for a while now.
    - dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I think even public companies often disclose the prices though, "Even public companies"? Public companies are required to report a lot of financial information publicly that non-public companies are neither required to report nor in the habit of reporting.
      - yuhong 10y ago

orsenthil 10y ago

The blog post is now up: http://blog.gitter.im/ http://blog.gitter.im/

ausjke 10y ago

thought gitter is part of github, what an ignorance.

dang 10y ago

Url changed from http://blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03/ http://blog.gitter.im/p/7e1c7194-347e-47f1-84d1-8149de853e03..., which disappeared.

sytse 10y ago
Thanks Daniel, sorry for circulating a draft post early.

rjain15 10y ago

What is the use of Gitter with Gitlab, in the post-slack world?

realPubkey 10y ago

Maybe we can then fix all the UI-bugs in gitter which pissed me on so often.

ohstopitu 10y ago

I love Gitlab but sadly, quite a lot of services that offer free accounts for open source projects (TravisCI comes to mind), generally don't integrate with Gitlab It's one of the few reasons why I am still using Github :( .

LyndsySimon 10y ago
I've yet to find something I needed that wasn't supported - or that there wasn't a better option available that did support it. TravisCI for instance, is easily replaced in all of my projects with Gitlab's integrated CI.
- FooBarWidget 10y ago
  I feel this way too. Not specifically about travis but about providing github integration as the only option Git is supposed to be distributed! How hard is it to ask people to provide a git url and tell them to push events to a webhook?
OJFord 10y ago
> I love Gitlab but sadly, quite a lot of services that offer free accounts for open source projects (TravisCI comes to mind) Isn't there a "but sadly I don't love its CI" missing from the middle of this? Why is Travis the problem?
jobvandervoort 10y ago
Let us know what projects you miss seeing integrated with GitLab and we'll try our best to convince them, help them in any way to make sure it happens! As other point out, you should be able to use GitLab CI instead of Travis, they configure very similarly. That said, I'd welcome them integrating fully with us as well.
- ohstopitu 10y ago
  I've used Gitlab CI before and I do like it, but TravisCI allowed for some granular control that Gitlab CI does not have (or that I am doing wrong) - for example, ability to run specific tests in case of pull/merge requests (TrasisCI has an environment variable for it). As for other projects - the most important one for me was clubhouse.io (Gitlab Issues is great but just not as good as clubhouse.io)

simplehuman 10y ago

This appears more like a acqui-hire. Also, since mattermost is bundled as part of GitLab, it makes me wonder why they didn't acquire mattermost instead. This is good though because mattermost is open-source only on paper. They refuse to integrate important features even when people contribute code (to protect their commercial version). Third, people see GitLab as GitHub competitor. But really it competes with Atlassian.

it33 10y ago
Hi @simplehuman, Mattermost team here, thanks for the mention. First, we love GitLab. While we'd be flattered with an offer to join them, Mattermost has its own mission and motivation (https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-source-slack-alternative/ https://www.mattermost.org/why-we-made-mattermost-an-open-so...) Second, regarding community contributions, we have an open and transparent process for proposing, discussing and vetting contributions before a pull request is made (https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/contribution-guide.html https://docs.mattermost.com/developer/contribution-guide.htm...). When people don't follow the guidelines, and when they work hard to contribute something before engaging with the broader community--especially when it totally works but can't be officially accepted--we feel terrible. Recent example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/5718 https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/5718 Previous related example: https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/2718 https://github.com/mattermost/platform/pull/2718 You can follow the links there to go into detailed, heated discussions around this in our own Mattermost instance. In our manifesto, we lay out the purpose of the open source Mattermost Team Edition, and about the commercial Enterprise Edition (https://www.mattermost.org/manifesto/ https://www.mattermost.org/manifesto/), and--at least in my mind--our decisions are based on scope (What purpose does X serve? Where should it belong, if at all)? Our contribution guidelines are in our docs, they're in our developer docs, they're displayed to contributors before they can submit a merge request, and yet with the size of our community, we still have mistakes and awkward threads. I hope we can do better here. If anyone would like to discuss, you're welcome to join our community server: https://pre-release.mattermost.com/ https://pre-release.mattermost.com/ Third, yes, agree, GitLab is certainly competing with Atlassian, and winning a lot.
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catshirt 10y ago

i was just hating on GitLab here a few days ago so i will take the opportunity to say this is really cool on a bunch of levels.

dorianm 10y ago

Think about your favorite github repo, or even just a very specific one, and there is always a few people talking about this repo: https://gitter.im/rails/rails https://gitter.im/rails/rails

yani 10y ago

That is awesome news. I have been using Gitlab for the last year. I switched over my personal projects and 3 organizations I was advicing from GitHub. They won me with their data centers in Asia and Europe. GitHub is extremely slow in Asia and they do not want to change.

sandGorgon 10y ago

@sytse - this is huge. You can move the YC internal slack to gitter as well ;) But seriously - people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter - especially after https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.ki286cqbu https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-w... Look at the number of people begging Discord to take money from them - https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/12454674-discord-as-a-replacement-to-slack-for-developers https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-... gitter always had search working - discord just got it recently.

orb_yt 10y ago
> people are willing to throw money for an enterprise gitter Isn't that just Slack?
- shadowfacts 10y ago
  The point of the first link is that free Gitter is already better than free Slack, so companies would be willing pay to have guaranteed support/uptime/etc from Gitter.
sytse 10y ago
Thanks Sandeep. We assume that it is easier to charge money to enterprises than open source communities. If we see strong adoption and feature requests from the enterprise we'll consider adopting an open-core model and charging for it. For now the adoption is mainly from open source communities and we think of our costs as a marketing expense. Do you know of any enterprises using Gitter?
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  No - because, like discord, gitter makes it a point to make privacy very hard to set up. This is fairly deliberate and is the reason why enterprises have a hard time adopting it.
  - 10y ago

hamandcheese 10y ago

Somewhat off topic, but I was once very interested in working for GitLab. According to their compensation calculator, though, I'd be making less than half what I make now (also working remotely). They ding me for living in a comparatively low cost area. I'm surprised they are able to attract talent to achieve what they have done so far. It makes me worry somewhat about my future prospects in an increasingly globalized talent pool.

kilroy123 10y ago
I'm also turned off by remote companies that do the same. I work remote and moved to a very low-cost area. That doesn't mean I want a massive pay cut.
- duncan_bayne 10y ago
  "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a bad principle to run both countries and companies.
  - Yahivin 10y ago
    Why should we run countries like companies?
    - Ellahn 10y ago
      That was never said, we obviously shouldn't. Finding something that applies to both (Or in this case something that works in neither, which makes it even clearer) is not the same as treating both as requiring the same solutions.
- usrusr 10y ago
  I guess if you are a remote friendly employer, you'd want to avoid both cutting yourself off from talent that happens to live in a high-cost area and getting completely overrun by applications from low-cost areas. And that could be reason enough even before applying the most obvious rule of acquisition, "don't pay more than you need". But yeah, the outcome, remoters from Cheaptown effectively subsidizing their coworkers from Glitter City is incredibly ugly. One should at least hope that the decisionmaking processes at the employer do not completely isolate the one deciding on a hire from the cost difference, so that flyover guy could at least enjoy an increased chance of getting the job.

nxrabl 10y ago

Discussion at: https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter https://gitter.im/gitterHQ/gitter The goal seems to be to have the code open sourced by this June, with all history included. Stack details here: https://stackshare.io/gitter/gitter https://stackshare.io/gitter/gitter

systemfreund 10y ago

When it's going to be open sourced then we could finally implement a proper matrix.org bridge. Currently all messages are relayed through a special gitter user called matrixbot

Arathorn 10y ago
matrix-appservice-gitter actually supports 'puppeting' already - letting you log in as your own user. But native Matrix support for Gitter would be incredible!

m0sa 10y ago

`git pull gitter`

connorshea 10y ago
More like `git merge gitter` :)

dantrevino 10y ago

great news!

dantrevino 10y ago

great news

radarsat1 10y ago

What the heck is Gitter? A public chat service? Sounds like adding yet a new way for people to bug you about things that don't work, but without the controlled discussion of opening a proper Issue. As a developer or maintainer, what value does this bring to a project?

kzisme 10y ago
It ties chats to Github repos/issues. I've never had any luck with clicking on one. IRC is much more useful in my opinion. I suppose they could make it work in some fashion, but opening an issue should suffice...

DeepAndDark 10y ago

I hope the search in gitter-chanels gets better now, cause of open-sourcing it. There are good infos and tips hidden. Maybe tags or upvotes would solve this.

omouse 10y ago

Hah, nice. Love it, love it that a whole business can run on free/open source and selling hosting/support.

ChuckMcM 10y ago

So the race to acquire the next team dev solution heats up. Slack + github + trello equivalent

sdesol 10y ago
From what I've read so far, I get the impression, Gitter was purchased solely for marketing value. And in a lot of ways, is quite ingenious. I would suspect, 80% if not more of the discussions that occurs on Gitter, revolves around repos that are hosted on GitHub. By tapping into those conversations, they'll probably be better able to identify GitHub pain points and provide subtle hints and nudges, for Gitter users to consider GitLab.com

marknadal 10y ago

Congrats to the gitter team, you guys are awesome and have a way (far far superior) product than slack.

gregjw 10y ago

Solidly great business decision, well done.

erlend_sh 10y ago

This is pretty weird to me: > What about Mattermost, how is this different? > Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience. > Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication. Surely GitLab would be better off investing fully into a single chat-platform? The road to making Gitter good for internal team communication is not particularly long or windy.

nico 10y ago

Up until this week I was in love with Gitlab. We've been using it at work for over a year as our main repo, code review tool and CI (tried self-hosted first, then moved to gitlab.com). However, the service (gitlab.com) is constantly having issues, most of them not reported on their status page or on their twitter status account. For the last week it's been practically unusable, to the point where our whole dev team combined has wasted almost a hundred hours just re-trying builds and deployment jobs. Yesterday we tried, unsuccessfully, moving to the new AWS tools (CodeCommit, CodeBuild and CodePipeline), and today we just moved back to Bitbucket + CircleCI (we use RoR if you are wondering). Unfortunately today I couldn't seriously recommend gitlab.com to anyone needing a reliable hosted repo + CI solution (maybe self-hosted works better though, YMMV). Regardless, I have a deep respect for what Gitlab as a company has done so far. After looking into repo + CI options I've realized that they've created probably the best all-in-one platform out there, at least their vision/concept. Wish them the best and hope to use their service again in the near future once they have their stuff together.

sytse 10y ago
Hi Nico, I'm sorry that you suffered our unreliability this week. We do try to update @gitlabstatus for everything that we see happening, no matter how small. We're determined to make GitLab.com a reliable platform, but we realize we still have a long way to go.
- nico 10y ago
  Thank you. I'm still a big fan of Gitlab and the vision you guys have. You've built an amazing organization and you'll definitely keep doing great things. Look forward to using your platform again in the future :)
  - sytse 10y ago
    Thanks Nico, glad to hear that you'll give us another chance.
YorickPeterse 10y ago

kureikain 10y ago

I really like Gitlab and this acquiring. When I firsted started as a developer, I don't know how people do thing in real production. I don't know how real company build real software. Nowsaday, with all open source thing from real company that acquire/shutdown I can finally learn a lots from them. Recently Stajoy open source everything, now Gitter is next. I'm sure I will learn a lot by consume the real code that run on production. Thank you Gitlab/Gitter.

itchyjunk 10y ago

Have used gitter a few times. I've heard it lacks moderator tolls from the channel owners a few times. OpenAI has their channel there too.

sherpajack 10y ago

So somewhat eerily, my Gitter GitHub public repo authorization token shows that it was accessed within the past 2 days, despite my not having logged in to any Gitter pages in months. http://imgur.com/a/aABi8 http://imgur.com/a/aABi8