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Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub
- cedricziel 8y agoI don't want to nitpick, but the Article says Alphabet.
- IshKebab 8y agoAlphabet is Google.
- DuckyC 8y agoNo, Alphabet is the parent company to Google. There's a slight difference.
- taneq 8y agoIt's Google plus companies that Google has spun off?
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoGoogle birthed a parent company called Alphabet.
- jake_the_third 8y agoWell I'll be.. A parent-child relationship more odd than those found in os process hierarchies.
- O_H_E 8y agoA formal difference on paper. Top management actually transferred from google to alphabet when alphabet came to life.
- gravis7777 8y agoWow - talk about splitting hairs
- blockchaincloud 8y agoThings are really bad when bloomberg makes mistakes like this- Github has nothing to do with Microsoft. Bloomberg of all should know what that means, even if a layman doesn't.
- dothedishes 8y agoIf even bloomber makes mistakes like this then who will not? Github has absolutely nothing to do with this and while a layman might not get it- its something every single one of bloombergs intended clients should and would.
- hden 8y agoIf anyone is looking for a alternative without tech giants’ grasp on it, Git over IPFS (or SSB) might me a interesting solution.
- dzhiurgis 8y ago> SSB Single Sideband Radio?
- detaro 8y agoSecure Scuttlebutt
- hardwaresofton 8y agoProbably https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot
- a-saleh 8y agoI was sharing the https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html https://scuttlebot.io/apis/community/git-ssb.html linke an hour ago at this site :P
- devttyeu 8y agoGit over IPFS is already WIP: There is mostly functional git remote - https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/git-remote-ipld https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/git-remote-ipld - It's still missing "full" remote tracking with IPNS, that will get implemented soon after next go-ipfs release, so it's a bit weird to use now Git portal is also taking shape: https://igis.io/ https://igis.io/ (also accessible via any gateway - https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/igis.io/ https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipns/igis.io/). Git repo is at https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/IGiS https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/IGiS (Dynamic features like pull-requests are hard). Edit: formatting
- drexlspivey 8y agoAnother alternative, Keybase recently launched encrypted git. https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone
- pibefision 8y agoCongrats to the whole Gitlab team! Great product and awesome people.
- tryum 8y agoI'm always wondering why github is more successful than gitlab... What github has that gitlab can't offer ?
- progfix 8y agoMy guess is because GitHub is American, GitLab is European.
- pgm8705 8y agoI always assumed it was just because github came first and became incredibly popular before anyone had even heard of gitlab.
- rollulus 8y agoWhat GitHub has that GitLab didn't offer in my experience last year is a snappy website. Apart from that I'm a huge fan of GitLab, it is superior. I believe that GitHub is more popular mainly because it was first, gained traction and became synonymous for some people with git itself, and open source.
- dsumenkovic 8y agoThanks for your feedback. You explained that really well using the word "popular". Here are more details why people are picking GitLab https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/19/git-wars-switching-to-gitlab/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/19/git-wars-switching-to-gi...
- hooluupog 8y agoSocial platform.
- rpeden 8y agoPerhaps it's just because GitHub came first? The market segment of web hosted Git repositories was a relatively new and small market segment when GitHub got started back in 2008. GitLab didn't appear until 2011, and at the time it didn't feel to me like a direct competitor. So GitHub had quite a bit of extra time to establish its presence and capture a large share of a growing market. For a large chunk of GitHub's users, GitHub fulfills their needs well enough that they don't feel much motivation to make a change. Even if GitLab is better than GitHub for a person or company, it has to be better enough to be worth the pain of switching. And I think for most users, that just isn't the case. Speaking anecdotally, there are some things about GitLab I like more than GitHub. And if I were starting out, I'd likely pick GitLab. But all of my code is on GitHub, and although I pay a monthly fee for private repos, it's small enough that it doesn't bother me.
- hardwaresofton 8y agoYeah, I don't want to live in a world where Google owns/buys out Gitlab, but I sure am happy to hear Gitlab getting more and more recognition. They've fully stepped out of the shadow of Github (for a long while, in my mind), and it's nice to see people taking attention.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chii 8y ago> I don't want to live in a world where Google owns/buys out Gitlab why not? If it means gitlab can have the resources to keep improving... and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns.
- taneq 8y agoBecause github is now owned by one evil empire, we don't want the most viable alternative to be owned by another.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago> and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns. Well, not entirely. The community aspect of GitHub would largely be lost if it vanished overnight and was replaced by scattered competing clones, even if they were running the exact same code.
- cs02rm0 8y agoYeah... if anyone remembers Google Wave, which was open sourced and pushed out to Apache when Google decided to close it down. Eventually that didn't even have enough momentum to live on under Apache. Which might not meet some definitions of fear, but it's not the best outcome for anyone who likes a product.
- MaxBarraclough 8y ago
- leowoo91 8y agoGood ol' Google. Shuts down code.google, promotes GitHub, then pays for competition.
- joeblau 8y agoThen buys competition, rolls competition into new code.google, then shuts down competition.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- glogla 8y agoThen shuts down new code.google.
- minikomi 8y agoThen creates a new chat app
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- pleasebecivil 8y agoHeres a signing bonus, when can you start?
- madmulita 8y agoWill they be holding back? I thought the new trend was to create a couple at the same time.
- digianarchist 8y agoSocial network. The second Wave.
- delaved 8y agoI don’t get it, why does it matter where your git repo is stored, or if a tech giant owns that company?
- gaius 8y agoI can well imagine a bidding war for Gitlab between Google and Oracle.
- Aeolun 8y agoPlease no.
- gtirloni 8y agoSome programmers were concerned about how Microsoft -- historically critical of open-source tools like GitHub and GitLab -- would change the platform as its new owner. I wasn't aware MS was critical of GitHub and GitLab. Does anyone has more info on this?
- bshimmin 8y agoIt's a misleading sentence, I would say - Steve Ballmer was very critical of open source (he once called Linux "a cancer"), but this was certainly "historically", ie. quite some years before GitHub and GitLab even existed.
- kgwgk 8y agoCritical of open-source tools. For the benefit of the reader, they explain that GitHub and GitLab are (more or less) open-source tools.
- petepete 8y agoSeeing as GitHub's never been open source I wouldn't worry too much about the overall accuracy this statement.
- majewsky 8y agoMicrosoft was historically critical of open-source tools (though not GitHub or GitLab because those didn't exist at the time): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
- ssijak 8y agoActually I trust Microsoft more with Github than I would trust Google. Never imagined I would say this until few months ago. Also I just left free google consumer services few days ago.
- s_dev 8y agoThe bigger and more authority something wields the more people should be should be inclined to be skeptical of it. More than a decade ago the behemoth was Microsoft. Now it's Google. I guess if those positions reversed again I'd go back to being more skeptical of Microsoft.
- kworker 8y agoMicrosoft still the largest software house. Of course Google is bigger on the web, but this doesn't make MS automatically a better choice even if it's fancy to call MS a trustworthy company as they invested few millions (out of billions) into FOSS ecosystem, basically because their cloud platform, meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else.
- tw04 8y ago>meanwhile do everything to destroy competition everywhere else. That's not even remotely true. Powershell core, SQL on Linux, WSL, vs code, etc etc. They're doing their best to give customers choice in just about every new product they release.
- tehbeard 8y agoDevelopers. Those are choices for developers, not their customers. Their customers are still primarily enterprise/gov. And the reason for giving choice and candy to the developers is to keep them onboard and happy to develop for the ecosystem, so that customers will continue to buy in as the ecosystem has what they need. I'm not saying WSL or VS Code are evil. They make developing on Windows a joy. But they make it a joy with that goal in mind.
- Presquare 8y agoFrom "Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement" (https://www.gwern.net/Complement https://www.gwern.net/Complement): > Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business & economics: the pattern of "commoditizing your complement" > This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields ... > ...they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in the stack, or defenses against it being done to them. After having read this article, it's been interesting how a lot of these investments have started making more sense. They often aren't primarily about the product itself, rather they serve the function of minimizing any leverage other companies could have over them. As Github offers an access to a valuable resource for tech companies, developers, Microsoft could use it to promote its products/services and to attract talent. This isn't good for Google, so they are hoping to reduce Microsoft's leverage. In some sense this is obvious, but I hadn't consciously identified this as a pattern before.
- maxxxxx 8y agoI hope somebody will do this to Google's business so they have to do something else than selling ads.
- sureaboutthis 8y agoSo all other media companies, too? Television networks, newspapers, magazines, etc.?
- radiorental 8y agoThat's why there is alphabet, labs etc. The business is trying to diversify.
- pdimitar 8y agoApologies if what I say is naive -- I don't follow Google announcements at all -- but they don't seem to try and progress any field per se, except maybe deep learning and only where it serves them (like one of their first successes was to reduce their power usage on a ship full of servers I think?). They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems), discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very heavy-handed in these situations. And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me if I am wrong. To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off on a massive scale.
- detaro 8y agoearlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025437 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025437
- tenfold 8y agoApproximate web traffic growth over last 6 months. GitLab: 4.1m to 4.6m visits GitHub: 542m to 561m visits
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoGitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly accepted (here) best practicies through and through. Very transparent to users, open core, very modern tech stack, entirely remote workforce, what more could you ask of a company? They aim to do things basically the way we as a community would ask. How will it turn out? Anyone's guess :)
- chrisseaton 8y ago> Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly accepted (here) best practicies through and through. Don't they have massive scaling problems? And didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently? GitHub doesn't seem to have faced the same problems - so it seems difficult to argue GitLab has better practices. > what more could you ask of a company? Reasonable page response times?
- etaioinshrdlu 8y agoI guess we will see how it turns out. I think the lesson here is that you can't just attempt to follow best practices and accepted wisdom without really thinking for yourself. (Nor would I argue they were clearly following best DB practices!)
- pknopf 8y ago> what more could you ask of a company? Support for plugins?
- bjpbakker 8y ago> didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently That was in February 2017 [0]. Not exactly recently IMO. I recall that Github also had data loss and scaling issues back when they were starting up. Those days are now gone for them though. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-incident/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-...
- iofiiiiiiiii 8y ago
- Proven 8y agoFxxx Alphabet
- gregoriol 8y agoOk Google, please leave Gitlab alone!
- kylnew 8y agoI wonder if this is a sign Google is sad they didn’t acquire GitHub first and now feel a competitive pressure to do something.
- dpcx 8y agoGoogle invested early in Gitlab. I'm not saying you're wrong, but they've been in this space for a long time already.
- dsumenkovic 8y agoThat's correct, here are more details about that. https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million-to-complete-devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-raises-20-million...
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThere's been a few stories about the fact that Google was also interested in buying GitHub. I think the GitHub CEO felt Microsoft would be a better fit for them.
- lifeisstillgood 8y agooh ok - now I get it...
- diminish 8y agoApple buys Microsoft and becomes the first $2T company.
- ealhad 8y agoIs there a GitHub/GitLab-like project using ActivityPub?
- d0ugie 8y ago> .. trust Microsoft more ducks in advance - I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP, mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85% of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded. All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic win-win for everybody. I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to that. Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and "keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield. I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests. That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers everybody! edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong and it could help me wake up.
- xte 8y agoIn the past we have had few "code repos" from Savannah to Sf and few sites like freshmeat to spread the news, the code, the idea. Of course we also have had and have used usenet. IMVHO today it's time to evalutare ZeroNet for project sites/blog and something like IPFS (not much convinced by this project but...) for code and repos to AVOID depend on someone else server's switching to relay only on us all. For me there is no difference in GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket etc, nor between Google and Microsoft. In an era of diversity companies are not a problem, in an oligopolistic era like today, in an era of proprietary platforms instead of open standard companies are a problem and should be avoided, especially if they are big, especially if they push mix of proprietary and FOSS solution.
- spot 8y agonot sure where you are coming from. did you know that gitlab is vastly more open source than github?
- antoineMoPa 8y agoIronically, I think Gitlab's popularity comes from the fact that it allowed free private repos, gaining more popularity in "closed source" teams. (At least, that's why I first used Gitlab)
- monkeynotes 8y agoWe have community edition deployed to AWS which is pretty neat. Not only do we have private repos, but the entire deployment is private and behind a firewall. Github would require you to sign up for an enterprise hosted account and pay +$$$s. For the project we have at work that would be a hard, hard sell - without Gitlab we'd be a bit screwed for modern Git workflow with easy code reviews and all the other great stuff Github pioneered.
- dsumenkovic 8y agoThere are plenty of reasons why people are picking GitLab. You can read more about it here https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/19/git-wars-switching-to-gitlab/ https://about.gitlab.com/2017/07/19/git-wars-switching-to-gi.... However, that's an old blog-post, today GitLab is the only single product for the complete DevOps lifecycle. Here you can find out more references about GitLab DevOps https://about.gitlab.com/devops/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops/.
- drakenot 8y ago"Alphabet’s role in funding the 350-person firm comes soon after it lost out to Microsoft in the bidding for GitHub. " Can someone describe to me how bidding for companies like GitHub works? Is it a blind bid where the highest bidder is selected? Or are participants given the opportunity to up their bid against one another?
- shagie 8y agoIt should be noted that the “bid” also included the ceo to be. And that was a critical part of winning the bid. There was certainly more to it than comparing two numbers.
- dqpb 8y agoIt needs a diff review system like Phabricators Differential
- conquistadog 8y agoFor self-hosters like me, I like and recommend Gitea [1] (based on gog). Same workflow as GitHub, but in your own hands. You can open it up to the masses or keep it close to the vest, your call. A Docker version is available, but its Go-ness makes it super easy (and even lighter) to deploy on its own anyway. [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/
- compute_me 8y agoI second this. Great for self-hosting on weaker machines or virtual servers and very simple setup in comparison. Such a sweet project!
- spin 8y agoI third this. I've installed/maintained and used gitolite, gitlab and gitea. - gitolite: easiest to install and manage. But there's no web interface. Your entire workflow is with git itself (and maybe some SSH/Unix tricks/scripts). - gitlab: huge, bloated beast. Many, many different components. Difficult to understand all the pieces. Uses a ton of ram and CPU cycles. UI and workflow is different from Github. - gitea: single, stand-alone package. UI and work-flow is identical to Github. Given all that it does, it seems about as simple and light-weight as it could be. (My only pain point is that it's written in Go, with Go packages, and I don't really know anything about Go...)
- KaiserPro 8y agoGitlab _could_ be a brilliant SaaS product. It has many more features than github, Runner integration allows simple and easy building, instead of having to bust out to circleCI. As a self hosted product, it is difficult to be beaten. but as a Saas product, its just horribly unreliable. In the last two months it has improved, but there are still outages every two weeks or so. (https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus) I'm hoping that with this extra cash, they'll be hiring in some infrastructure people (people who will look at this in horror: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/11/proposed-server-purchase-for-gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/11/proposed-server-purchase... ) who actually know how to make a stable platform using _proven "boring"_ stuff, not sexy slow and supposedly HA stuff like Ceph and forcing it to serve NFS.
- dsumenkovic 8y agoThanks for your comment, we really appreciate the feedback. Our team is working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com. According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%, although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August 2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we obviously have much less data than from Azure). Using the data publicly available from Pingdom, here are some interesting stats: Mean-time between outages in Azure (September 2017 through August 11 2018): 1.3 days Mean-time between outages in GCP (September 2017 through August 12 2018): 7.3 days (if you ignore some problems we experienced on the first day after the migration, this rises to 12 days!) Since, migrating to GCP, our overall availability, according to Pingdom, has risen to 99.92%. Again, if you exclude the few hiccups that we experienced on the Monday immediately following the migration, this rises to 99.97%. There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more stable.
- MordodeMaru 8y agoWhat are your thoughts on Auto DevOps? It seems that Gitlab is being perceived more and more as an end-to-end devops platform that is mostly automated but I've heard it doesn't work really well.
- rleigh 8y agoPotentially, very powerful. Running docker-based pipelines, deploying on kubernetes, and having it all integrated with the merge request review workflow is really, really nice. GitHub doesn't do anything at this level at all, even with third-party integrations. Right now, I've got several local machines hooked up to gitlab.com as runners. A mixture of virtual machines for various platforms, and docker hosts. No kubernetes yet; but likely at some point. The main problems are that sometimes gitlab.com is flaky. Pipeline jobs fail, never get started, or never complete. Not often, but enough that I can't guarantee things will work without manual prodding. I saw quite a few instances of this a few weeks ago, but it's been OK this week. Stuff like the runner timing out pulling a docker image, the job completing but not actually finishing, or the pages job running but the deploy step getting stuck with no way to debug it. Other things are UI annoyances, like the pipeline status not updating frequently enough, leading to repeated manual page refreshes, particularly on navigating back in the history to the pipeline page from a specific job page.
- jl-gitlab 8y agoHey, PM at GitLab for CI/CD here. We're making a lot of investments in both the infrastructure supporting gitlab.com as well as the functionality and reliability of the CI pipelines themselves, including looking at intermittent issues and other patterns of reports coming in through our support team. I'm really glad to hear you're excited about the way we integrate everything together.. that's something we're really proud of with our product and an area we're going to continue to invest in as well. This year we're going to explicitly plan things out so that we're building a breadcrumb trail back for all users to start taking advantage of those more advanced features. You can check out the rest of our vision for 2019 here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify - would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on it.
- pimmen 8y agoThe only thing I miss from Github is the traffic analysis, otherwise I’m fully content with Gitlab.
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y agothe innovation here is 'buyout'
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jplayer01 8y agoCan we stop giving Google more control and influence over our lives? They're not any better than Microsoft.
- dragonwriter 8y agoAnd yet GCP (e.g., Code Repositories) only supports GitHub and BitBucket integration, not GitLab.