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The problem with Gitlab is that in the current state it is a dead product walking. Its existence is entirely based on VC FOMO. It has no enterprise growth to ju
by notyourday 7y ago
The problem with Gitlab is that in the current state it is a dead product walking. Its existence is entirely based on VC FOMO. It has no enterprise growth to justify company valuation. And it won't have real enterprise growth either.
Github had to be acquired my MSFT because it had no path for real enterprise growth if it could not lean on an organization that already sold a pile of services and products in similar or complimentary space. MSFT was the only strategic buyer of Git hosting company. MSFT is the only circus that could use that monkey to fill the gap in its product line up. Of course it picked Github rather than Gitlab. Which is why Github would be incredibly successful, which in turn means that Gitlab in its current state won't be. Hence they would have to massively change the product to justify valuations. It would be interesting to watch.
SourceHut is in the exact position Gitlab was before VC FOMO. It can provide decent service that people and companies will pay for but they would never get a billion dollar value. As long as it works for them, it will work out just fine. I wish them well.
- gbear605 7y agoSourcehut intentionally is not going to accept VC money and they know they won’t get a billion dollar value.
- dijit 7y agoSorry, this is painfully deluded. Gitlab is the _only_ choice when your company prefers on-prem (which is the overwhelming majority of >10k employee companies) -- I work at a company with more than 15k employees and we hold an enterprise (plus) license for 8k seats. We are definitely not alone, companies like EA/IBM/Goldman Sachs have _large_ internal deployments of gitlab. They certainly have developer mindshare in large companies, but github is the facebook of sourcecode repositories, it will always be more popular outside (or in smaller, less self-hosty orgs).
- notyourday 7y agoGitlab is a single product company with no sales force behind it. It already sold to all the customers that it could easily sell to. In order to sell to the rest they would need to have staffed regional offices to do really really really long term sales cycles. It is an unsolvable problem in a current state. Microsoft is a hundred if not thousand product company with gigantic sales force and sales channels that are beyond the level of imagination of companies who say "remote only" is their differentiator. Github Enterprise exists. I know it because we used it. Github will be sold as a part of the rest of the Microsoft product portfolio, which is how they would end up in those coveted enterprises.
- dijit 7y agoMicrosoft is still considered a pariah by the kinds of people who would use gitlab. It will be 100 years before my company puts their core business in the hands of a SaaS provider.
- notyourday 7y agoGithub Enterprise is not SaaS. It is on-prem.
- elygre 7y agoIt’s not “on prem” anymore when part of the product is on a third party server.
- pfranz 7y ago> Gitlab is the _only_ choice when your company prefers on-prem Is that literal or figurative? GitHub Enterprise is on premises. I used it at my last company which was on an air gapped network. It looks like it has been around since 2011. There are countless other self-managed variations in size and feature combinations of git hosting, ticket tracking, and other things it offers.
- dijit 7y agoFigurative. Obviously it’s possible to host git on your own servers. But github enterprise on prem is a comparatively weak offering. Githubs bread is made from people using their SaaS offerings and it shows. (I’ve used many different self hosted options for version control. Although to be fair my current company uses perforce for the overwhelming majority of its version control)
- rubidium 7y agoCounterpoint: My fortune 200 employer uses GitHub enterprise on site. It works great. I don’t get how you can say GitLab is the only choice?
- 2ion 7y agoNonsense. Github Enterprise at my last job (used there since 2012) was so much more refined and reliable than Gitlab EE is at my job now, which has much worse UI and no good flow at all. All Github clones (like Gogs, Gitea) lean on the Github UI for a reason, ignoring Gitlab. It's a mess. Since Microsoft's acquisition, even github.com is progressing refinement at a higher pace than gitlab.com ever did, and I'll be thrilled when I get my company to switch to Github again. Pricewise, Github EE is much better value for the dollar than Gitlab EE; most features that Github doesn't have are rather half-assed than wholesomely done in Gitlab.
- fanf2 7y agoWe use GitLab. We rejected GitHub Enterprise because it’s a closed system: we could not use it to host public open source repositories like we can with GitLab. GitHub’s sales pitch was funny, all about “inner source”, applying open source development processes to closed corporate software as if it would be a step forward, whereas we were way past that point already so it would have actually been a step backwards for us.
- notyourday 7y agoHN really needs to have a baseline rule of shadowbaning the downvotes by all accounts associated with a company subject of the article.
- detaro 7y agoAnd you should refamiliarize yourself with HN's baseline rules about suggesting this kind of thing is what's happening to you.
- notyourday 7y agoIt is just silly. HN is becoming more and more a platform where discussions are gamed by the companies that are being discussed. What's the point of having them when Gitlab employees downvote anything that does not say "Gitlab gooood!", Google employees downvote anything that is not positive about Google and Facebook employees downvote non-positives about facebook.
- wglb 7y agoAccusations of astroturfing are against the guidelines. Downvotes often signal disagreement or call out a low-quality comment.