5 ms·

I like gitlab, but a mixed open source / closed source product is always going to be a challenge in terms of hearts and minds. Take this quote from the article.

by eadz 9y ago

I like gitlab, but a mixed open source / closed source product is always going to be a challenge in terms of hearts and minds. Take this quote from the article. > The other way to look at it is that this is pretty advanced stuff, and frankly, it doesn’t deserve to be, free, open source. So is all the stuff that gitlab builds on, like git, or ruby, or linux, that's all pretty advanced stuff I'd say.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
Wow that really is a poorly worded phrase. If someone from GL is reading this, please fix that, it makes you look pretty bad. Just be honest and say you want to charge for advanced features, because there's little money to be made in open source and you're a business after all and want to pay your employees a living wage.
- mariusmg 9y ago
  >it makes you look pretty bad. But they are being honest, they are saying what they are thinking....
  - dominotw 9y ago
    Being honest and 'looking petty bad' are not contradictory.
  - oblio 9y ago
    They could rephrase it to: "we consider this an enterprise usage pattern for our software so this feature will be included in the paid Enterprise Edition".
- Already__Taken 9y ago
  It says all those things your comment does. This is what happens when you dump an entire transcript of an hour long video, someone takes one poorly phrased line.
- Snappy 9y ago
  Yeah, that was poorly phrased, sorry. One of the awesome aspects of being transparent by default: taking an internal conversation between three coworkers and making the recording and transcript public. I love being able to share our strategy publicly and talk about it openly. While I can't change what I said, we can make the blog post more accurately reflect our beliefs as reflected on our Stewardship page[0]. There's no limit on what "deserves" to be open source. And, imho, GitLab has open sourced a ton of advanced functionality already. But "GitLab Inc. is a for profit company that balances the need to improve GitLab Community Edition (CE) with the need to add features to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) exclusively in order to generate income." [0] https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/ https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/
d33 9y ago
> The other way to look at it is that this is pretty advanced stuff, and frankly, it doesn’t deserve to be, free, open source. Did they actually say that...? I only went to the page to confirm this and it appears true. Sounds like next time I choose self-hosted Github alternative, I should exclude Gitlab from my options - based on their approach so far, it feels like they really do mean this kind of contemptuous attitude of "only basic stuff should be free software". I used to cheer for Gitlab, but this is just way over the line. And despite what some say, I really don't think it's that great a product - they seem to be focused on getting a million of things poorly than get their core fixed. Performance is still terrible, see what happens to your browser when you view a diff for a large merge request. Also, you there's a limit to the number of commits in the history you can browse - come on, my `git log` loads the whole history in a split second but you can't render it? And they clearly don't care - I reported many issues to them that got confirmed and most of the time those were just shrugged off. As long as you're not an EE user, you won't really get much more than the annoyance of having odd version numbers make the sidebar sticky and even ones undo that.
- chrisshroba 9y ago
  In your opinion, what is a valid reason for software to be non-open source? Sure, saying the software doesn't "deserve" to be open source might be a bit extreme, but I keep seeing the sentiment on HN that free and open source is the only allowable route and people who want to charge for their software are to be demonized. I'm curious under what circumstances you think it is allowable for a company to profit off of software their engineers were paid to write?
  - burner5308 9y ago
    There's no reason for any software not to be open source, aside from greed.
  - d33 9y ago
    There seems to be a lot of confusion around free software and open source. You can sell open source software (as a matter of fact, you can sell free software too). First of all, open source only means that source is available - the license is up to the developer though and it might as well be paid for commercial use etc. "Free" has two meanings - "free of charge" and "free as in freedom". I'm not arguing for "free of charge" - while it's nice to have software that you don't have to pay for, I could imagine, say, buying Microsoft Windows if I had access to the source code and could hack it as I go. "free as in freedom" means that I can not only access the code, but also redistribute it and use it in any way I see fit. This doesn't mean that the developers can't sell it though - they can sell support, extra features, hosting and so on. There are ways to profit from free/open source software. I could as well imagine Gitlab Foundation and Gitlab Ltd, where one provides the core and the other non-free modules that cover enterprise use cases. I don't like their current scheme though.
Vinnl 9y ago
The formulation is a bit weird. I can't find it right now, but I recall reading in the past that features that are typically only useful when an instance has 100 or more users are the ones that are not made open source. That said, they've open sourced often requested features [0]. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34591#note_56042405 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34591#note_56...
ebbv 9y ago
I had a similar reaction, that quote seems extremely ignorant and tone deaf. Open source is all about shattering that mentality from Day 1; making an open source POSIX compatible OS.
Snappy 9y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. Changed with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/10612 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/.... Advancedness is not a criteria in open sourcing or not open sourcing. There are advanced features that are open source, such as Review Apps[0]. There are basic features that are proprietary, such as File Locking[1]. The criteria we use to decide which version the features go in are documented on our stewardship page[2]. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/ [1] https://about.gitlab.com/features/file-locking/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/file-locking/ [2] https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/#what-features-are-ee-only https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/#what-features-are-ee-o...

by eadz 9y ago

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

Wow that really is a poorly worded phrase. If someone from GL is reading this, please fix that, it makes you look pretty bad. Just be honest and say you want to charge for advanced features, because there's little money to be made in open source and you're a business after all and want to pay your employees a living wage.

mariusmg 9y ago
>it makes you look pretty bad. But they are being honest, they are saying what they are thinking....
- dominotw 9y ago
  Being honest and 'looking petty bad' are not contradictory.
- oblio 9y ago
  They could rephrase it to: "we consider this an enterprise usage pattern for our software so this feature will be included in the paid Enterprise Edition".
Already__Taken 9y ago
It says all those things your comment does. This is what happens when you dump an entire transcript of an hour long video, someone takes one poorly phrased line.
Snappy 9y ago
Yeah, that was poorly phrased, sorry. One of the awesome aspects of being transparent by default: taking an internal conversation between three coworkers and making the recording and transcript public. I love being able to share our strategy publicly and talk about it openly. While I can't change what I said, we can make the blog post more accurately reflect our beliefs as reflected on our Stewardship page[0]. There's no limit on what "deserves" to be open source. And, imho, GitLab has open sourced a ton of advanced functionality already. But "GitLab Inc. is a for profit company that balances the need to improve GitLab Community Edition (CE) with the need to add features to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) exclusively in order to generate income." [0] https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/ https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/

d33 9y ago

> The other way to look at it is that this is pretty advanced stuff, and frankly, it doesn’t deserve to be, free, open source. Did they actually say that...? I only went to the page to confirm this and it appears true. Sounds like next time I choose self-hosted Github alternative, I should exclude Gitlab from my options - based on their approach so far, it feels like they really do mean this kind of contemptuous attitude of "only basic stuff should be free software". I used to cheer for Gitlab, but this is just way over the line. And despite what some say, I really don't think it's that great a product - they seem to be focused on getting a million of things poorly than get their core fixed. Performance is still terrible, see what happens to your browser when you view a diff for a large merge request. Also, you there's a limit to the number of commits in the history you can browse - come on, my `git log` loads the whole history in a split second but you can't render it? And they clearly don't care - I reported many issues to them that got confirmed and most of the time those were just shrugged off. As long as you're not an EE user, you won't really get much more than the annoyance of having odd version numbers make the sidebar sticky and even ones undo that.

chrisshroba 9y ago
In your opinion, what is a valid reason for software to be non-open source? Sure, saying the software doesn't "deserve" to be open source might be a bit extreme, but I keep seeing the sentiment on HN that free and open source is the only allowable route and people who want to charge for their software are to be demonized. I'm curious under what circumstances you think it is allowable for a company to profit off of software their engineers were paid to write?
- burner5308 9y ago
  There's no reason for any software not to be open source, aside from greed.
- d33 9y ago
  There seems to be a lot of confusion around free software and open source. You can sell open source software (as a matter of fact, you can sell free software too). First of all, open source only means that source is available - the license is up to the developer though and it might as well be paid for commercial use etc. "Free" has two meanings - "free of charge" and "free as in freedom". I'm not arguing for "free of charge" - while it's nice to have software that you don't have to pay for, I could imagine, say, buying Microsoft Windows if I had access to the source code and could hack it as I go. "free as in freedom" means that I can not only access the code, but also redistribute it and use it in any way I see fit. This doesn't mean that the developers can't sell it though - they can sell support, extra features, hosting and so on. There are ways to profit from free/open source software. I could as well imagine Gitlab Foundation and Gitlab Ltd, where one provides the core and the other non-free modules that cover enterprise use cases. I don't like their current scheme though.

Vinnl 9y ago

The formulation is a bit weird. I can't find it right now, but I recall reading in the past that features that are typically only useful when an instance has 100 or more users are the ones that are not made open source. That said, they've open sourced often requested features [0]. [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34591#note_56042405 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/34591#note_56...

ebbv 9y ago

I had a similar reaction, that quote seems extremely ignorant and tone deaf. Open source is all about shattering that mentality from Day 1; making an open source POSIX compatible OS.

Snappy 9y ago

Thanks for pointing this out. Changed with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/10612 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/.... Advancedness is not a criteria in open sourcing or not open sourcing. There are advanced features that are open source, such as Review Apps[0]. There are basic features that are proprietary, such as File Locking[1]. The criteria we use to decide which version the features go in are documented on our stewardship page[2]. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/review-apps/ [1] https://about.gitlab.com/features/file-locking/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/file-locking/ [2] https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/#what-features-are-ee-only https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship/#what-features-are-ee-o...