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The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does, if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want. Gitlab is
by tinco 8y ago
The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does, if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want.
Gitlab is big enough that should they ever be killed by a Google acquisition (I don't think that's likely), a strong enough community would sprout and keep maintaining it.
- jrochkind1 8y agoDo you have examples of open source software in a similar situation (one company providing coordination and final approval in the previous project; similar complexity level to Gitlab, whatever that is), where that happened successfully? I'm not challenging necessarily, I legitimately am interested in examples.
- daxelrod 8y agoIt depends on your definition of “kill”. OpenSolaris -> Illumos Hudson -> Jenkins OpenOffice -> LibreOffice MySQL -> MariaDB (not killed, but forked out of fear it would be) And a non-Oracle example: Node.js -> IO.js (arguable - forked because Node dev was stagnant, eventually merged)
- oblio 8y agoAll those had communities outside the main company long before they "moved out". What's the percentage of external contributors to GitLab? 1%?
- tinco 8y agoHmm what about the Blender project, would that one count? I admit it's difficult to come up with examples, though I don't know of any failures either. RethinkDB has been sort of a failure, but it was never very popular to begin with.
- hansflying 8y agoGitHub can also be self-hosted: https://github.com/enterprise https://github.com/enterprise
- dewey 8y agoYou can't compare that as it's a paid enterprise on-prem version not something you can self-host and keep running as long as you want. You won't get community fixes for it like it would be the case if Google were to abandon Gitlab if an acquisition would be the case.
- teddyh 8y agoThat’s not what “self-hosted” means.