8 ms·

> GitLab, a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises, ... This claim is false. The linked survey shows that GitLab has a 2/3 market share in self-hosted

> GitLab, a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises, ... This claim is false. The linked survey shows that GitLab has a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers. Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository.

jlgaddis 9y ago
Why let the truth get in the way of a good press release!? /s
- Cthulhu_ 9y ago
  You're saying it's a falsehood and Nicole Plati, our media contact, gave alternative facts to that.
  - jlgaddis 9y ago
    There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above). I've been a fan of GitLab's for quite a while (mostly due to your transparency; I just created an account a few weeks ago to try it out) but -- unless you are claiming that GitLab is being used by two-thirds of "all enterprises" -- this is very misleading, IMO.
    - notyourday 9y ago
      > There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above). And even that is a total pulled out of the ass claim. At most it could be "who responded to our survey"
      - Karunamon 9y ago
        It would take a lot less than 2/3 to have a representative sample, fwiw
    - zerocrates 9y ago
      They're an unconnected user referencing Kellyanne Conway, I'm fairly sure.
      - jlgaddis 9y ago
        In that case, my apologies to GitLab. I assumed from the comment ("our media contact") that this was a GitLab employee. Thanks.
dominotw 9y ago
I bought this up on HN in the past[1], but it gets instantly downvoted( by gitlab employees?) , my comment was a response to CEO claiming how their marketing is honest[2]. They also declared Gitlab CI as number one CI by excluding Jenkins because of their made up defintion of "modern" . 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654
- YorickPeterse 9y ago
  You are most likely getting downvoted because of statements such as: > These guys are not honest people, just copycats under the guise of "open".
  - dominotw 9y ago
    You are right. Thats how i felt but that was unnecessary to say here. Deleted that from my comment.
- SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
  This whole thread is full of their employees arguing (quite aggressively in some cases) with people for calling them out or questioning their marketing claims. I wouldn't be surprised if they're downvoting en-masse too. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their company and I'm surprised this type of behaviour is allowed on HN.
- compuguy 9y ago
  Last time I checked Jenkins is a modern CI product.
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    Depends on your definition of modern. I don't really care what you call it, the fact of the matter is that it's slow and an inferior product.
camgunz 9y ago
How much do you really care if their marketing department is aggressive? Isn't it better that GitLab is open source and a reasonably good member of the OSS community? Honestly I don't even count those stats as false; Jenkins feels super old and the context weirdness ("Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository") actually makes sense. If this is the trade to support OSS, it's way better than building a shadow surveillance state under the guise of profit via advertising revenue.
- sandworm101 9y ago
  >>> if their marketing department is aggressive? Telling lies /= aggressive. Where advertising makes claims that are objectively false they should be called out. This isn't 'puffing' or hyperbolic opinion. This is saying X is Y. That these lies are in support of an agenda with which many here might agree does not matter.
  - cisanti 9y ago
    Sorry to burst your bubble but advertising is always lying and shilling.
    - Xylakant 9y ago
      That makes it even more important to call it out.
    - rkangel 9y ago
      No, it's really not. Pages I have open: In the jobs boxout on StackOverflow I'm pretty confident that McLaren Applied Technologies is looking a lead C#/.NET developer. On another page, the UK Mobile network '3' is offering 12Gb for the price of 4Gb. I know that's true because I took them up on it (and even for 4Gb it's still cheaper than any other network). I could provide many other counter-examples but I don't need to because you used 'always' in your absolutist statement. Yes, a lot of advertising twists the truth. No, not everything does. And for things that we hold to a higher standard (like a great open source project like Gitlab) we can point out places where they don't meet that standard in the (not unrealistic) hope that they'll improve.
sytse 9y ago
We claim it based on the assumption that almost all very large companies (enterprise) host their own source code and they are switching to git. We have 2/3 market share with self hosted git as shown with two data points https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-has-23-market-share-in-the-self-hosted-git-market https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-has-23-marke... I'll consider adding the rationale to the page. We're seeing organizations adopt SaaS but the largest companies tend to be the last ones to switch. You quote 'a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises'. I see this as a different and weather claim. We and our competition can easily make that claim since almost all Fortune 500 companies have at least one use of GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian.
- bunderbunder 9y ago
  I would assume, at the very least, that some significant portion of those enterprises who are switching to Git are Microsoft shops who are just switching to a version of TFS that includes Git. I'd also guess that "Bitrise users" is a sample group that differs in significant ways from "Enterprise users".
- dominotw 9y ago
  From bitrise link > We randomly selected 10,000 apps as a base "2/3 of all enterprises" can only be true if all enterprises are building apps on bitrise.
  - sytse 9y ago
    I do agree that the majority of Bitrise their population is not the enterprise at all. The only other representative data we could find was from BuddyBuild https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/source-code-hosting#selfhosted https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/source-code-hosting#selfhost... and has the same problem. You can see that it also isn't enterprise because the vast majority of their respondents is cloud hosted. If there is a better data source we can use I would love to know. It seems hard to get data on self hosted organizations. Traditionally you looked at the number of paying customers, but that doesn't work with open source.
tzs 9y ago
I tend to believe claims of the form X is used by Y% of Z, but not give much weight to them because they are usually less impressive than they sound. For example, I recall IBM marketing once claimed that OS/2 was used in some very high percentage (it was close to 100%, if I recall correctly) of Fortune 500 companies (or some similar group). Did that mean OS/2 was taking off in the enterprise, displacing Windows left and right? Nope. It just meant that most Fortune 500 companies had at least one OS/2 system. Take advantage of its excellent DOS multitasking to migrate a few legacy DOS systems from dying old hardware to a single new machine under OS/2, and your Fortune 500 company counts as using OS/2 even if that is the only OS/2 system you have.
deleted 9y ago
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throwawaymanbot 9y ago
In a different article, GitLab state this very thing. Self-Hosted being the word they themselves used. This PR release was kind of misleading. Its great that Debian and GNOME are going to be using it however.
williamchia 9y ago
Thank you for your candid feedback - we've updated our homepage to include a more accurate headline: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/8278#note_48205124 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

jlgaddis 9y ago

Why let the truth get in the way of a good press release!? /s

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
You're saying it's a falsehood and Nicole Plati, our media contact, gave alternative facts to that.
- jlgaddis 9y ago
  There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above). I've been a fan of GitLab's for quite a while (mostly due to your transparency; I just created an account a few weeks ago to try it out) but -- unless you are claiming that GitLab is being used by two-thirds of "all enterprises" -- this is very misleading, IMO.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    > There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above). And even that is a total pulled out of the ass claim. At most it could be "who responded to our survey"
    - Karunamon 9y ago
      It would take a lot less than 2/3 to have a representative sample, fwiw
  - zerocrates 9y ago
    They're an unconnected user referencing Kellyanne Conway, I'm fairly sure.
    - jlgaddis 9y ago
      In that case, my apologies to GitLab. I assumed from the comment ("our media contact") that this was a GitLab employee. Thanks.

dominotw 9y ago

I bought this up on HN in the past[1], but it gets instantly downvoted( by gitlab employees?) , my comment was a response to CEO claiming how their marketing is honest[2]. They also declared Gitlab CI as number one CI by excluding Jenkins because of their made up defintion of "modern" . 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654

YorickPeterse 9y ago
You are most likely getting downvoted because of statements such as: > These guys are not honest people, just copycats under the guise of "open".
- dominotw 9y ago
  You are right. Thats how i felt but that was unnecessary to say here. Deleted that from my comment.
SmellyGeekBoy 9y ago
This whole thread is full of their employees arguing (quite aggressively in some cases) with people for calling them out or questioning their marketing claims. I wouldn't be surprised if they're downvoting en-masse too. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their company and I'm surprised this type of behaviour is allowed on HN.
compuguy 9y ago
Last time I checked Jenkins is a modern CI product.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  Depends on your definition of modern. I don't really care what you call it, the fact of the matter is that it's slow and an inferior product.

camgunz 9y ago

How much do you really care if their marketing department is aggressive? Isn't it better that GitLab is open source and a reasonably good member of the OSS community? Honestly I don't even count those stats as false; Jenkins feels super old and the context weirdness ("Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository") actually makes sense. If this is the trade to support OSS, it's way better than building a shadow surveillance state under the guise of profit via advertising revenue.

sandworm101 9y ago
>>> if their marketing department is aggressive? Telling lies /= aggressive. Where advertising makes claims that are objectively false they should be called out. This isn't 'puffing' or hyperbolic opinion. This is saying X is Y. That these lies are in support of an agenda with which many here might agree does not matter.
- cisanti 9y ago
  Sorry to burst your bubble but advertising is always lying and shilling.
  - Xylakant 9y ago
    That makes it even more important to call it out.
  - rkangel 9y ago
    No, it's really not. Pages I have open: In the jobs boxout on StackOverflow I'm pretty confident that McLaren Applied Technologies is looking a lead C#/.NET developer. On another page, the UK Mobile network '3' is offering 12Gb for the price of 4Gb. I know that's true because I took them up on it (and even for 4Gb it's still cheaper than any other network). I could provide many other counter-examples but I don't need to because you used 'always' in your absolutist statement. Yes, a lot of advertising twists the truth. No, not everything does. And for things that we hold to a higher standard (like a great open source project like Gitlab) we can point out places where they don't meet that standard in the (not unrealistic) hope that they'll improve.

sytse 9y ago

We claim it based on the assumption that almost all very large companies (enterprise) host their own source code and they are switching to git. We have 2/3 market share with self hosted git as shown with two data points https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-has-23-market-share-in-the-self-hosted-git-market https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-has-23-marke... I'll consider adding the rationale to the page. We're seeing organizations adopt SaaS but the largest companies tend to be the last ones to switch. You quote 'a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises'. I see this as a different and weather claim. We and our competition can easily make that claim since almost all Fortune 500 companies have at least one use of GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian.

bunderbunder 9y ago
I would assume, at the very least, that some significant portion of those enterprises who are switching to Git are Microsoft shops who are just switching to a version of TFS that includes Git. I'd also guess that "Bitrise users" is a sample group that differs in significant ways from "Enterprise users".
dominotw 9y ago
From bitrise link > We randomly selected 10,000 apps as a base "2/3 of all enterprises" can only be true if all enterprises are building apps on bitrise.
- sytse 9y ago
  I do agree that the majority of Bitrise their population is not the enterprise at all. The only other representative data we could find was from BuddyBuild https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/source-code-hosting#selfhosted https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/source-code-hosting#selfhost... and has the same problem. You can see that it also isn't enterprise because the vast majority of their respondents is cloud hosted. If there is a better data source we can use I would love to know. It seems hard to get data on self hosted organizations. Traditionally you looked at the number of paying customers, but that doesn't work with open source.

tzs 9y ago

I tend to believe claims of the form X is used by Y% of Z, but not give much weight to them because they are usually less impressive than they sound. For example, I recall IBM marketing once claimed that OS/2 was used in some very high percentage (it was close to 100%, if I recall correctly) of Fortune 500 companies (or some similar group). Did that mean OS/2 was taking off in the enterprise, displacing Windows left and right? Nope. It just meant that most Fortune 500 companies had at least one OS/2 system. Take advantage of its excellent DOS multitasking to migrate a few legacy DOS systems from dying old hardware to a single new machine under OS/2, and your Fortune 500 company counts as using OS/2 even if that is the only OS/2 system you have.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwawaymanbot 9y ago

In a different article, GitLab state this very thing. Self-Hosted being the word they themselves used. This PR release was kind of misleading. Its great that Debian and GNOME are going to be using it however.

williamchia 9y ago

Thank you for your candid feedback - we've updated our homepage to include a more accurate headline: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/8278#note_48205124 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...