18 ms·

Gitlab cancels plan on tracking user behavior on GitLab.com

602 points by tyteen4a03 7y ago

tyteen4a03 7y ago
This comment, from the CFO, is particularly nasty: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#note_203849107 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...
- user9837 7y ago
  I wonder if Microsoft not allowing full telemetry opt-out in Windows 10 opened a precedent for this kind if thing.
- kgwxd 7y ago
  At least they said what they actually thought and opened a discussion instead of spewing one of the standard canned PR statements. The replies are a pretty good source of arguing against the position he took and now can be referenced by anyone else having a similar discussion.
  - user9837 7y ago
    Did they said that because they always speak they're minds or because forced telemetry is becoming a norm? We will never know I guess.
- zapita 7y ago
  You may or may not agree with that comment, but it is not nasty. What is nasty, on the other hand, is the vitriolic reaction to it. So far I count 16 "middle finger" emojis, including one with the subtitle "incompentent or malicious CFO". In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior? It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be. Does a company like Gitlab really deserve to have its employees publicly insulted in this way, after giving away so much to their users, for free, and being so much more transparent than 99% of tech companies? At this point I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would go to the trouble of making their product open-source. It's just not worth it.
  - liability 7y ago
    > "It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be." 'Allowed' to be? The "open source culture" is the sum of the participants and participation is open to the general public. If being rude were "not allowed" who would be doing the not allowing and why should they be so empowered over members of the general public?
    - zapita 7y ago
      And we collectively allow this behavior. Do we not? For example, I don't see anyone stepping up in that github thread and saying that insults and middle finger emojis are not OK. That's because that behavior is normalized. Participants in the thread either a) are OK with it; b) have resigned themselves to it; c) are refraining from speaking up for fear of being attacked too. That is what I mean by "allowed to happen".
      - liability 7y ago
        What would it mean for me to 'not allow' other members of a free society to speak their mind? Your right to criticize it and their right to say it are one and the same. Criticizing it and not permitting it are not the same thing.
        zapita 7y ago
        If you are participant of the Gitlab community, you could speak up in that thread and say that you are not OK with people being insulted over a disagreement. I won't fault you for not wanting to, though. You would probably be attacked too, and have to spend a few hours of your life justifying yourself.
        liability 7y ago
        There is a keen difference between criticizing it and forbidding it. Gitlab may forbid it on their platform, but they don't have the ability, let alone right, to regulate the speech of the general public outside their platform.
- dsissitka 7y ago
  Here's a screenshot for people that don't feel like waiting for the page to load: https://imgur.com/a/uxaU0h8 https://imgur.com/a/uxaU0h8 How is GitLab still this slow?
  - badrequest 7y ago
    It's a Rails app trying to load hundreds of different bits of data (emojis, comments, votes on comments, etc.), I'd honestly be more surprised if it were quick.
    - thenewnewguy 7y ago
      GitHub loads similar data and is also written in rails, but long GitHub PRs/issues are significantly faster to load.
  - dijit 7y ago
    It’s probably hammering the database right now. These kind of things, by nature, are difficult to cache because the balance between “fresh” new content and how often they are accessed leans heavily towards having it served from the backend directly.
    - ericmcer 7y ago
      Resources are cached, lightweight JSON that dictates how to lay those resources out is fresh, doesn’t seem tooooo difficult
  - swagonomixxx 7y ago
    Ruby on Rails backend, I think.
    - heartbreak 7y ago
      Github is also RoR backend, and it's not this slow.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- colechristensen 7y ago
  What? >I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that. In what way is that "nasty"?
  - sigzero 7y ago
    It's "clueless" but not "nasty".
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      It's either extremely clueless or nasty, but regardless, it also expresses a suggestion that's hostile to the users.
- 250R 7y ago
  looks like CFO actual need is the historical data for LTV calculations https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/13297 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/13297
swoongoonz 7y ago
remember when everyone was bailing on github because of evil microsoft?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- rvz 7y ago
  Most of everyone's main reason was that GitLab was "open source" and also supports free software. As much as they claim to do, I'm afraid that by being partially owned by VCs, they are at the mercy of pleasing those who may conflict with these ideas in favour of adware such a telemetry or ad-tracking. A very principled move from GitLab to revert this, but I think that GitLab's trusted is damaged due to this.
  - nessunodoro 7y ago
    I think it will bring them under more scrutiny and rightfully so. But this sounds like a misunderstanding, both of the GDPR and user sentiment, enforced without discussion from the top. They responded quickly, humbly, and transparently in reversing the decision. I'm not sure about long-term erosion of trust, although this may harm subscription levels or contract negotiation in the medium term
    - tssva 7y ago
      An employee comment in the relevant merge request indicates that they are already knowing non-compliant with the GDPR. While I applaud their openness I wonder if this will comeback to bite them.
      - Omin 7y ago
        Do you have a link (or screenshot) of that comment?
        tofof 7y ago
donarb 7y ago
Gitlab has also committed to doing a post-mortem on this, just as they do for crashes or data breaches, which is a good thing.
jbk 7y ago
We received an apology email at the same time, well written, explaining what they did wrong, apologizing, promising to do a post-mortem, promising to not send to 3rd party trackers, and saying they did a mistake and waiting for feedbacks on the issue tracker. And with very little BS in the mail. Such level of transparency, of apologizing and clarity, especially written at the first person "I am truly sorry." is very rare and should be praised.
- stiray 7y ago
  What should really be praised... Without further, congratulations to everyone protesting against this gitlab move. This is something that should be done years back when google started with its tracking, same with facebook. This was the behaviour that should be seen each and every time some company wants to take advantage of its users. But to my sadness it is rarely seen. So once again congratulations to each and every gitlab user that did anything against their move.
  - brlewis 7y ago
    Yeah, people back then should have written angry replies to Google's and Facebook's advance warnings about the tracking they were planning on doing. /s
    - journalctl 7y ago
      Oh, so we only live in a surveillance-capitalist state because we didn’t send Facebook and Google enough emails? D’oh! Who knew it was that simple?
      - reactor4 7y ago
        read it again...
  - tjoff 7y ago
    It was done. There even was those small banners that said something in the way of "if you have gmail I won't mail you" etc. Thing is, the broader public don't care. The difference between gitlab and gmail is primarily that developers care more about this stuff and value their code more than most people care about their email. They are also much more informed in the matter, most using gmail haven't got a clue.
falcor84 7y ago
Could someone here please explain to me why Gitlab's product managers would be so interested in client-side analytics in the first place? From my familiarity with their service, almost every operation requires an ajax call, or a full page refresh. Is there really that much value for the product managers in these additional analytics?
- afiori 7y ago
  I believe in this case it is server-size analytics. The case were this would have been significan would have been with self-hosted instances as there gitlab controls neither the servers not the clients
- robszumski 7y ago
  Even anonymous cohort analysis can be super useful as a product manager. If you want to encourage usage of a particular feature and the most successful users of that feature fit into a cohort, you can reach out to them for feedback, optimize paths between those features, improve documentation connecting relevant features together, etc. This doesn't mean its malicious or all about the $$$...it might be that users that set up GitLab CI have 40% fewer security incidents and they want to encourage that behavior as a better customer outcome with the overall product. edit: and this behavior might take place over a long period of time, not something you can get from access logs or just-in-time stats.
  - falcor84 7y ago
    That's an interesting point. But wouldn't the vast majority of Gitlab users be signed in (and thus server-side trackable)? Pretty much all functionality other than just reading code seems to require it.
    - teej 7y ago
      The only way to know this would be if you read the entire discussion across 2+ threads on the Gitlab site for their event tracking MR. Basically this whole shit show started as so: * Gitlab previously used 3rd party infrastructure for their user event tracking * They did not send this 3rd party user id for GDPR and other reasons * Because they did not have user id, they could not understand user behavior across sessions. Understanding user behavior across sessions is important, so they wanted to add it. * Gitlab had just finished moving their event tracking infrastructure in house. * The original MR was to add user id as an attribute to their event tracking What proceeded was what I consider a very reasonable back and forth between data, infrastructure, and legal on the correct way to add user id. But somewhere along the line it went off the rails. How it turned from simply adding user id into including Pendo JS tags for on-prem customers, I have no idea.
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
I don't understand, what changed? This was last updated on the 24th. They said they'll be re-evaluating it and returning later, but afaict they haven't made any statements about a blanket cancellation of the telemetry roll-out.
- lbotos 7y ago
  An email is being sent right now, but emailing at scale... takes time: ---8<--- Dear GitLab users and customers, On October 23, we sent an email entitled “Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services” announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake. So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that’s not the main thing we did wrong. Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first. So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672 If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback. I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes. Sincerely, Sid Sijbrandij Co-Founder and CEO GitLab
igreulich 7y ago
I don't see where it is canceled. The closest thing I see to canceled, is postponed. From the update: 'We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan.' That leaves a lot of wiggle room.
- epoch_100 7y ago
  "Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service." That seems like a pretty solid indication that the plans are cancelled.
  - itake 7y ago
    That sounds like they are going to roll out a first-party service, which is better, but not great for the self-hosted deployments.
    - musicale 7y ago
      Telemetry still sucks. I don't want it, and it should never be opt-out.
      - scrollaway 7y ago
        You opt in to first party telemetry by using gitlab. It is impossible for you not to send data to gitlab when using gitlab. Self-host it if you don't want it. I dunno what to tell you; at some point, the company does have to observe how people use their product, and they'll do so a lot more effectively by looking at how most people are using it, rather than … idk, send a survey or something. Not that they won't do the latter anyway, nothing prevents them from doing that, but it's a very different type of data. I'm a privacy nut by the way, and nothing in that field pisses me off more than people who vocally shit on telemetry. "I hate you, you should just GUESS what I want rather than do real work to figure it out" sort of thing. What is it about telemetry you don't like, exactly? And I do say "telemetry" in general, because you're saying it sucks in general. So no specific examples like Windows 10's abhorrently overreaching telemetry, privacy invasions that look at PII, etc. Telemetry generally is things like "97% of users have visited the issue tracker. 66% of projects with an issue tracker enabled have at least 1 issue. new issue rate on public repositories climbs by 15% if the new issue button is orange instead of green. users spend 30% more time on the new issue page if there's a new issue template. issues with a template have a commit/mr associated with them at a 8% higher rate than issues with empty templates". By choosing to die on this hill, you're taking both good-will and attention away from much more severe issues of telemetry abuse, such as "let's collect the precise geoloc of all our users in our gay dating app at 5 minute intervals, store it for 3 years and not care one ounce about security".
mobee 7y ago
The real reason you shouldn't be using GitLab is performance. How is it possible that that page took over a minute to load? Nevermind that the design is completely incomprehensible.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I make a habit out of pushing to both gitlab and github. Even if github is technically superior, I don't think we're served well in the long run by monocultures. (But yes, gitlab's web interfaces are generally frustrating. Slow, bugged, or just organized in ways I find challenging.)
- swasheck 7y ago
  further down the thread are mentioned of ruby on rails. i use gitlab because it allows me > 1 private repo. if there are better solutions then i'm all ears.
  - smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
    Have a look at GitHub. It's a similar service with unlimited private repos for free.
    - swasheck 7y ago
      thanks. not sure why i was downvoted but the last time i checked, GH only allowed 1
      - catalogia 7y ago
        They only started allowing free private repos this year: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/
      - sleepytimetea 7y ago
        You are correct but Github allows them now so I moved back to GH.
tyre 7y ago
The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people. They fucked up, users gave feedback, they listened. This isn't some corporate conspiracy, some grand ethical dilemma with an evil company on one side and some white knight hackers on the other. Let's imagine for a second that they are people trying to do the right thing, with years of history doing the best they can. They wanted to measure usage to make their product better. People seem to disagree, which, okay, but the outrage here is everything wrong with the internet.
- Operyl 7y ago
  I think what sparked a bit more outcry in this matter is the way the CFO responded to discussion and early warnings way before it was finalized. EDIT: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#note_203849107 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...
  - cwkoss 7y ago
    Bit surprised that Paul Machle is still employed as CFO.
    - mbesto 7y ago
      Lesson learned here - the CFO is not and should not be responsible for a company's tracking policies and communication thereof.
      - bigiain 7y ago
        Sadly, that "F" means they pretty much have veto power over anything anybody (with the possible exception of the CTO and the board) wants to do.
        maximente 7y ago
        sadly? that the board failed to stop this (or was bypassed) is telling, but this doesn't seem like a failure of the corporate governance model or anything. money is basically essential to a corporation; engineering staff shouldn't be on the level of C suite, despite what many here would have you believe
thsowers 7y ago
Is this supposed to read "misunderstands"? And if not, could you elaborate?
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  Yes, it was. Thanks, I edited it.
buremba 7y ago
We sent an MR to Gitlab 1.5 years ago (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/merge_requests/15697 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/merge_requests/156...) implementing our open-source analytics tool to their app and letting the system administrators opt-in to this feature if they want to analyze their user behavior but it looks like Gitlab wanted to implement a centralized user tracking feature for themselves instead. However, given that most of the Gitlab customers / open-source community cares about their privacy and want to have the control (well, that's probably why they switched to Gitlab from other products), I wonder why they wanted to follow this approach in the first place. The good thing is that they almost always know how to take action when their community reacts.
akerro 7y ago
I'm happy to enable telemetry on my self-hosted Gitlab if that makes gitlab better, maybe make it opt-in instead opt-out?
foreign-inc 7y ago
How can you trust a company like GitLab whose default decision is always bad and then they change direction after public outcry. Either they don't think before they make decisions or they are just trying to figure out what they can get away with. This really shows their lack of morality. They kind of remind me of Facebook.
- xiphias2 7y ago
  How can you trust a company that does the same things behind closed doors? With GitLab we know about everything that's happening and can react before bad things happen. This is awesome.
- techntoke 7y ago
  Lol, I think you're forgetting about another provider. Besides you can always try Gitea.
  - flukus 7y ago
    Is the on premise one different? The hosted one leaks data to google and cloudflare.
musicale 7y ago
> It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions Well yes, it should be obvious by now that requiring users to opt out to avoid some privacy-violating behavior is a facebook-class dark pattern.
notJim 7y ago
I find the anti-telemetry attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them. Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all. Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.
- mkl 7y ago
  Web tracking is different in that it's ongoing tracking of behaviour. When I buy something from a shop, that's the end of their knowledge: the shop has no idea what I use it for.
  - notJim 7y ago
    Hmm, that must be where the breakdown is. It seems like you view just the transaction as your interaction with Gitlab, but to me if I'm on Gitlab, I'm still "in the shop" so to speak. So to me it's more like sitting in a coffee shop than going to the grocery store.
    - dx87 7y ago
      One of the big issues people had with the Gitlab proposal was that it was going to use 3rd party trackers, so Gitlab wouldn't have full control over your data. Some people were commenting that if the analytics data never left Gitlab, they wouldn't have an issue with it. They were also going to block access to your account until you accepted the tracking. Following the shopping analogy, it'd be like they let you in the store, but they won't let you leave with your purchase until you fill out a survey by a 3rd party company.
  - kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
    When you make non-cash purchases in a shop they sell your purchase data to an aggregator who adds it into their profile of you and derives demographic classifications from that. Single woman driving a Subaru? Your odds of being lesbian go up a few points. We'll target you for a certain form of advertising. This has been going on for decades. Before the web ever existed.
andrewbinstock 7y ago
>We have not yet added instrumentation to the Enterprise edition versions, and we will not do so until we have a way for self-hosted customers to opt out... (Scott Williamson, Gitlab VP of product, responding to the OP) That's not the right way to do it. Customers should need to opt in, rather than having to opt out.
segmondy 7y ago
This is just the beginning, at some point, they will flip. Google was our darling, that could do no wrong. Just imagine, to be bold and say "Don't be evil!" And then, what happened? This is just a short term reaction to quiet down the noise, but their long term hand has been exposed. They are not going to do it, but note that nothing says they won't try to or do it again in the far future. What I really will like to know is how they will profit off that data. Is it even going to make a bump on their bottom line?
- deleted 7y ago
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- mav3rick 7y ago
  What happened ? Google is still one of the better players around. They pulled out of DoD contracts etc. This site just hates it for every single thing..it's just group think now , majority of the general public still loves it.
  - pferde 7y ago
    Majority of the general public does definitely not love, nor hate Google. They are merely indifferent and tolerate it, just like they tolerate Microsoft, or more recently Facebook, despite all the flaws and annoyances their products have. The general public does not really care, they just want to get on with their lives.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    They trust lots of other companies more, including Amazon http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/americans-cant-agree-on-anything-except-loving-amazon.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/americans-cant-agree-...
    - mav3rick 7y ago
      No bathroom breaks and shitty benefits.
deleted 7y ago
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PacifyFish 7y ago
Maybe I've missed the boat, but what's the big deal about collecting telemetry? You already trust Gitlab with everything you store in Gitlab, like source code, which is presumably much more sensitive than the number of times you loaded a page or clicked on a button or whatever. Is it because the data would be stored with a third party, and you don't trust that third party? If Gitlab trusts the third party, and they're giving you the option to NOT trust the third party and only trust Gitlab, what's the issue?
- sleepytimetea 7y ago
  "in Gitlab" has 2 meanings - Gitlab cloud and Gitlab on-premises. For customers running off-the-grid or in countries with enhanced privacy (GPDR?) laws and restrictions on where their data lives, this is not what they signed up for. Nor was the timeline forced on them reasonable in any way. Imagine your Oracle software TOS says we will now export anonymized data from your SQL queries to somewhere out there in the cloud ? What if it was a HIPAA-compliant hospital datacenter ? We wouldn't want first-party telemetry either, we don't want _any_ data leaving our datacenter, period.
btashton 7y ago
Something a little ironic about putting a tracked click link in an email apologizing for adding tracking. That said I firmly believe in opt-in tracking and would likely enable it for my gitlab usage.
dreamcompiler 7y ago
I'm glad they reversed course and apologized but it still amazes me how powerful the reality distortion bubble can be even at well-meaning corporations. It's as if there was a meeting at the Red Cross where somebody said "Hey why don't we start selling guns? It would be a great fundraising tool." And everybody in the room just nodded and said "Yeah that's a pretty great idea. Let's start tomorrow!"
jamiequint 7y ago
This is incredibly dumb. Both Pendo and Snowplow are analytics providers, meaning they both have in their TOS that the company remains the owner of the data in question and that the services only exist to facilitate analysis of the data in question. Effectively this is users complaining that Gitlab wants to simplify their data analysis overhead. Presumably nothing precludes them from sending the exact same data to these companies and more on the backend. What do users expect? For Gitlab to build every single part of their stack in-house (CRM, analytics, support tooling, etc)? Because that's what this is effectively asking for. What's next? Protesting that a company uses RDS instead of their own hand-rolled Postgres setup? Because this is the same level of stupid.
- deleted 7y ago
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- mobjack 7y ago
  There is a lot of FUD whenever someone mentioned third party because many don't know the difference between a dedicated analytics provider and Facebook.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    How would you know a difference, how could you trust the difference (given the adtech industry being what it is), and how can you know things won't change over time? All that without being in a contractual relationship with that third party.
    - jamiequint 7y ago
      Are you in a contractual relationship with AWS for every service you use that uses AWS on the backend? How about Loggly? How about BigQuery/Snowflake? Intercom if they use that? Salesforce? Facebook and Google if they run ads? They may not do anything weird with your data now but how can you know that things won’t change over time?
      - 7y ago
OrgNet 7y ago
how did they get caught?
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  They self-pwnd themselves. They posted a blog post saying that starting very soon, everyone will be getting third-party telemetry, self-hosted instances included.
AdrienLemaire 7y ago
Great attitude. Interesting correlation with the episode S06E01 of Silicon Valley released this week, on the same topic :)
koalaman 7y ago
How is this different from the telemetry that VS Code is collecting? The "community" seems to have swallowed that pill with much less complaining.
- account42 7y ago
  Is that the same community that is complaining now?
omani 7y ago
it still boggles my mind how one can use gitlab.
gorkemcetin 7y ago
Long story short, if Gitlab were to use a open source & self hosted platform (like Countly) with a clear mentioning of what to collect and what not, clarifying that nothing is collected which is not anything unknown to them, there would be no problems. Gitlab CEO has provided the right response with the right tone, which is something we don't usually see in big corps. I again would like to stress that such platforms not use 3rd party analytics providers but a self hosted and/or in-house solution.
sacrificedcapon 7y ago
Is it possible to enforce american spelling ( especially in the title )? Behavior vs Behaviour? HN is an american company and gitlab is an american company so people who participate here should use correct american spelling. The gitlab post itself uses the correct spelling - behavior. "In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology"
- samsari 7y ago
  So if the subject on the story was a Swedish company you'd presumably be up here arguing that people who participate should use the correct Swedish spelling?
Yuval_Halevi 7y ago
I'm impressed by the way Gitlab is communicating on a personal level with all of their users on email bombs.
ptah 7y ago
I think it would be more acceptable if they let users preview the data sent
tachion 7y ago
Well, I suppose that's The Gitlab Drama for this quarter. /s
je42 7y ago
If i compare this to StackOverflows communication, I like this way a lot more.
techntoke 7y ago
This just tells me that someone needs to continue working on Gitea or another open source alternative so that you can easily self host something comparable to GitLab enterprise. Yes, GitLab has an open source CE version but it has limited functionality. If another open source solution can implement the same functionality as their enterprise product, then GitLab will be forced to adopt or risk losing their business. Time to put some pressure on them.
mbar84 7y ago
I'm normally one to hold a grudge. I still don't buy Sony products for something they did over a decade ago. In this case I think forgiveness is appropriate. There are obviously people working at Gitlab who have terrible ideas, but the organization seems to be able to deal with them in a healthy and transparent way. This compares favourably to companies like Zoom or Equifax.
grumpy-cowboy 7y ago
If I pay for a product (on-premise), it's not your business what I do with it. If I use the free hosted service (ex: gitlab.com), then this is the price to pay for a free service (within legal rules like GDPR). BTW, it's too late for me. I'm about to move all my stuff to a self-hosted Gitea (on a cheap VPS) in addition to Matrix, Mastodon, ...

602 points by tyteen4a03 7y ago

This comment, from the CFO, is particularly nasty: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#note_203849107 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...

user9837 7y ago
I wonder if Microsoft not allowing full telemetry opt-out in Windows 10 opened a precedent for this kind if thing.
kgwxd 7y ago
At least they said what they actually thought and opened a discussion instead of spewing one of the standard canned PR statements. The replies are a pretty good source of arguing against the position he took and now can be referenced by anyone else having a similar discussion.
- user9837 7y ago
  Did they said that because they always speak they're minds or because forced telemetry is becoming a norm? We will never know I guess.
zapita 7y ago
You may or may not agree with that comment, but it is not nasty. What is nasty, on the other hand, is the vitriolic reaction to it. So far I count 16 "middle finger" emojis, including one with the subtitle "incompentent or malicious CFO". In what world does a disagreement over the right level of telemetry justify this kind of behavior? It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be. Does a company like Gitlab really deserve to have its employees publicly insulted in this way, after giving away so much to their users, for free, and being so much more transparent than 99% of tech companies? At this point I don't understand why anyone in their right mind would go to the trouble of making their product open-source. It's just not worth it.
- liability 7y ago
  > "It's mind-boggling to me how entitled and aggressive the open-source culture is allowed to be." 'Allowed' to be? The "open source culture" is the sum of the participants and participation is open to the general public. If being rude were "not allowed" who would be doing the not allowing and why should they be so empowered over members of the general public?
  - zapita 7y ago
    And we collectively allow this behavior. Do we not? For example, I don't see anyone stepping up in that github thread and saying that insults and middle finger emojis are not OK. That's because that behavior is normalized. Participants in the thread either a) are OK with it; b) have resigned themselves to it; c) are refraining from speaking up for fear of being attacked too. That is what I mean by "allowed to happen".
    - liability 7y ago
      What would it mean for me to 'not allow' other members of a free society to speak their mind? Your right to criticize it and their right to say it are one and the same. Criticizing it and not permitting it are not the same thing.
      - zapita 7y ago
        If you are participant of the Gitlab community, you could speak up in that thread and say that you are not OK with people being insulted over a disagreement. I won't fault you for not wanting to, though. You would probably be attacked too, and have to spend a few hours of your life justifying yourself.
        liability 7y ago
        There is a keen difference between criticizing it and forbidding it. Gitlab may forbid it on their platform, but they don't have the ability, let alone right, to regulate the speech of the general public outside their platform.
dsissitka 7y ago
Here's a screenshot for people that don't feel like waiting for the page to load: https://imgur.com/a/uxaU0h8 https://imgur.com/a/uxaU0h8 How is GitLab still this slow?
- badrequest 7y ago
  It's a Rails app trying to load hundreds of different bits of data (emojis, comments, votes on comments, etc.), I'd honestly be more surprised if it were quick.
  - thenewnewguy 7y ago
    GitHub loads similar data and is also written in rails, but long GitHub PRs/issues are significantly faster to load.
- dijit 7y ago
  It’s probably hammering the database right now. These kind of things, by nature, are difficult to cache because the balance between “fresh” new content and how often they are accessed leans heavily towards having it served from the backend directly.
  - ericmcer 7y ago
    Resources are cached, lightweight JSON that dictates how to lay those resources out is fresh, doesn’t seem tooooo difficult
- swagonomixxx 7y ago
  Ruby on Rails backend, I think.
  - heartbreak 7y ago
    Github is also RoR backend, and it's not this slow.
deleted 7y ago
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colechristensen 7y ago
What? >I don’t understand. This should not be an opt in or an opt out. It is a condition of using our product. There is an acceptance of terms and the use of this data should be included in that. In what way is that "nasty"?
- sigzero 7y ago
  It's "clueless" but not "nasty".
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It's either extremely clueless or nasty, but regardless, it also expresses a suggestion that's hostile to the users.
250R 7y ago
looks like CFO actual need is the historical data for LTV calculations https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/13297 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/13297

swoongoonz 7y ago

remember when everyone was bailing on github because of evil microsoft?

deleted 7y ago
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rvz 7y ago
Most of everyone's main reason was that GitLab was "open source" and also supports free software. As much as they claim to do, I'm afraid that by being partially owned by VCs, they are at the mercy of pleasing those who may conflict with these ideas in favour of adware such a telemetry or ad-tracking. A very principled move from GitLab to revert this, but I think that GitLab's trusted is damaged due to this.
- nessunodoro 7y ago
  I think it will bring them under more scrutiny and rightfully so. But this sounds like a misunderstanding, both of the GDPR and user sentiment, enforced without discussion from the top. They responded quickly, humbly, and transparently in reversing the decision. I'm not sure about long-term erosion of trust, although this may harm subscription levels or contract negotiation in the medium term
  - tssva 7y ago
    An employee comment in the relevant merge request indicates that they are already knowing non-compliant with the GDPR. While I applaud their openness I wonder if this will comeback to bite them.
    - Omin 7y ago
      Do you have a link (or screenshot) of that comment?
      - tofof 7y ago

donarb 7y ago

Gitlab has also committed to doing a post-mortem on this, just as they do for crashes or data breaches, which is a good thing.

jbk 7y ago

We received an apology email at the same time, well written, explaining what they did wrong, apologizing, promising to do a post-mortem, promising to not send to 3rd party trackers, and saying they did a mistake and waiting for feedbacks on the issue tracker. And with very little BS in the mail. Such level of transparency, of apologizing and clarity, especially written at the first person "I am truly sorry." is very rare and should be praised.

stiray 7y ago
What should really be praised... Without further, congratulations to everyone protesting against this gitlab move. This is something that should be done years back when google started with its tracking, same with facebook. This was the behaviour that should be seen each and every time some company wants to take advantage of its users. But to my sadness it is rarely seen. So once again congratulations to each and every gitlab user that did anything against their move.
- brlewis 7y ago
  Yeah, people back then should have written angry replies to Google's and Facebook's advance warnings about the tracking they were planning on doing. /s
  - journalctl 7y ago
    Oh, so we only live in a surveillance-capitalist state because we didn’t send Facebook and Google enough emails? D’oh! Who knew it was that simple?
    - reactor4 7y ago
      read it again...
- tjoff 7y ago
  It was done. There even was those small banners that said something in the way of "if you have gmail I won't mail you" etc. Thing is, the broader public don't care. The difference between gitlab and gmail is primarily that developers care more about this stuff and value their code more than most people care about their email. They are also much more informed in the matter, most using gmail haven't got a clue.

falcor84 7y ago

Could someone here please explain to me why Gitlab's product managers would be so interested in client-side analytics in the first place? From my familiarity with their service, almost every operation requires an ajax call, or a full page refresh. Is there really that much value for the product managers in these additional analytics?

afiori 7y ago
I believe in this case it is server-size analytics. The case were this would have been significan would have been with self-hosted instances as there gitlab controls neither the servers not the clients
robszumski 7y ago
Even anonymous cohort analysis can be super useful as a product manager. If you want to encourage usage of a particular feature and the most successful users of that feature fit into a cohort, you can reach out to them for feedback, optimize paths between those features, improve documentation connecting relevant features together, etc. This doesn't mean its malicious or all about the $$$...it might be that users that set up GitLab CI have 40% fewer security incidents and they want to encourage that behavior as a better customer outcome with the overall product. edit: and this behavior might take place over a long period of time, not something you can get from access logs or just-in-time stats.
- falcor84 7y ago
  That's an interesting point. But wouldn't the vast majority of Gitlab users be signed in (and thus server-side trackable)? Pretty much all functionality other than just reading code seems to require it.
  - teej 7y ago
    The only way to know this would be if you read the entire discussion across 2+ threads on the Gitlab site for their event tracking MR. Basically this whole shit show started as so: * Gitlab previously used 3rd party infrastructure for their user event tracking * They did not send this 3rd party user id for GDPR and other reasons * Because they did not have user id, they could not understand user behavior across sessions. Understanding user behavior across sessions is important, so they wanted to add it. * Gitlab had just finished moving their event tracking infrastructure in house. * The original MR was to add user id as an attribute to their event tracking What proceeded was what I consider a very reasonable back and forth between data, infrastructure, and legal on the correct way to add user id. But somewhere along the line it went off the rails. How it turned from simply adding user id into including Pendo JS tags for on-prem customers, I have no idea.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago

I don't understand, what changed? This was last updated on the 24th. They said they'll be re-evaluating it and returning later, but afaict they haven't made any statements about a blanket cancellation of the telemetry roll-out.

lbotos 7y ago
An email is being sent right now, but emailing at scale... takes time: ---8<--- Dear GitLab users and customers, On October 23, we sent an email entitled “Important Updates to our Terms of Service and Telemetry Services” announcing upcoming changes. Based on considerable feedback from our customers, users, and the broader community, we reversed course the next day and removed those changes before they went into effect. Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service. This clearly struck a nerve with our community and I apologize for this mistake. So, what happened? In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology. Clearly, our evaluation and communication processes for rolling out a change like this were lacking and we need to improve those processes. But that’s not the main thing we did wrong. Our main mistake was that we did not live up to our own core value of collaboration by including our users, contributors, and customers in the strategy discussion and, for that, I am truly sorry. It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions, first versus third-party tracking, data protection, security, deployment flexibility and many other topics, and we should have listened first. So, where do we go from here? The first step is a retrospective that is happening on October 29 to document what went wrong. We are reaching out to customers who expressed concerns and collecting feedback from users and the wider community. We will put together a new proposal for improving the user experience and share it for feedback. We made a mistake by not collaborating, so now we will take as much time as needed to make sure we get this right. You can be part of the collaboration by posting comments in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/5672 If you are a customer, you may also reach out to your GitLab representative if you have additional feedback. I am glad you hold GitLab to a higher standard. If we are going to be transparent and collaborative, we need to do it consistently and learn from our mistakes. Sincerely, Sid Sijbrandij Co-Founder and CEO GitLab

igreulich 7y ago

I don't see where it is canceled. The closest thing I see to canceled, is postponed. From the update: 'We will not activate user level product usage tracking on GitLab.com or GitLab self-managed before we address the feedback and re-evaluate our plan.' That leaves a lot of wiggle room.

epoch_100 7y ago
"Further, GitLab will commit to not implementing telemetry in our products that sends usage data to a third-party product analytics service." That seems like a pretty solid indication that the plans are cancelled.
- itake 7y ago
  That sounds like they are going to roll out a first-party service, which is better, but not great for the self-hosted deployments.
  - musicale 7y ago
    Telemetry still sucks. I don't want it, and it should never be opt-out.
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      You opt in to first party telemetry by using gitlab. It is impossible for you not to send data to gitlab when using gitlab. Self-host it if you don't want it. I dunno what to tell you; at some point, the company does have to observe how people use their product, and they'll do so a lot more effectively by looking at how most people are using it, rather than … idk, send a survey or something. Not that they won't do the latter anyway, nothing prevents them from doing that, but it's a very different type of data. I'm a privacy nut by the way, and nothing in that field pisses me off more than people who vocally shit on telemetry. "I hate you, you should just GUESS what I want rather than do real work to figure it out" sort of thing. What is it about telemetry you don't like, exactly? And I do say "telemetry" in general, because you're saying it sucks in general. So no specific examples like Windows 10's abhorrently overreaching telemetry, privacy invasions that look at PII, etc. Telemetry generally is things like "97% of users have visited the issue tracker. 66% of projects with an issue tracker enabled have at least 1 issue. new issue rate on public repositories climbs by 15% if the new issue button is orange instead of green. users spend 30% more time on the new issue page if there's a new issue template. issues with a template have a commit/mr associated with them at a 8% higher rate than issues with empty templates". By choosing to die on this hill, you're taking both good-will and attention away from much more severe issues of telemetry abuse, such as "let's collect the precise geoloc of all our users in our gay dating app at 5 minute intervals, store it for 3 years and not care one ounce about security".

mobee 7y ago

The real reason you shouldn't be using GitLab is performance. How is it possible that that page took over a minute to load? Nevermind that the design is completely incomprehensible.

catalogia 7y ago
I make a habit out of pushing to both gitlab and github. Even if github is technically superior, I don't think we're served well in the long run by monocultures. (But yes, gitlab's web interfaces are generally frustrating. Slow, bugged, or just organized in ways I find challenging.)
swasheck 7y ago
further down the thread are mentioned of ruby on rails. i use gitlab because it allows me > 1 private repo. if there are better solutions then i'm all ears.
- smudgymcscmudge 7y ago
  Have a look at GitHub. It's a similar service with unlimited private repos for free.
  - swasheck 7y ago
    thanks. not sure why i was downvoted but the last time i checked, GH only allowed 1
    - catalogia 7y ago
      They only started allowing free private repos this year: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/
    - sleepytimetea 7y ago
      You are correct but Github allows them now so I moved back to GH.

tyre 7y ago

The reaction to this whole saga has been insane. Chill out people. They fucked up, users gave feedback, they listened. This isn't some corporate conspiracy, some grand ethical dilemma with an evil company on one side and some white knight hackers on the other. Let's imagine for a second that they are people trying to do the right thing, with years of history doing the best they can. They wanted to measure usage to make their product better. People seem to disagree, which, okay, but the outrage here is everything wrong with the internet.

Operyl 7y ago
I think what sparked a bit more outcry in this matter is the way the CFO responded to discussion and early warnings way before it was finalized. EDIT: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#note_203849107 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/merge_requests/14182#no...
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Bit surprised that Paul Machle is still employed as CFO.
  - mbesto 7y ago
    Lesson learned here - the CFO is not and should not be responsible for a company's tracking policies and communication thereof.
    - bigiain 7y ago
      Sadly, that "F" means they pretty much have veto power over anything anybody (with the possible exception of the CTO and the board) wants to do.
      - maximente 7y ago
        sadly? that the board failed to stop this (or was bypassed) is telling, but this doesn't seem like a failure of the corporate governance model or anything. money is basically essential to a corporation; engineering staff shouldn't be on the level of C suite, despite what many here would have you believe

thsowers 7y ago

Is this supposed to read "misunderstands"? And if not, could you elaborate?

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
Yes, it was. Thanks, I edited it.

buremba 7y ago

We sent an MR to Gitlab 1.5 years ago (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/merge_requests/15697 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/merge_requests/156...) implementing our open-source analytics tool to their app and letting the system administrators opt-in to this feature if they want to analyze their user behavior but it looks like Gitlab wanted to implement a centralized user tracking feature for themselves instead. However, given that most of the Gitlab customers / open-source community cares about their privacy and want to have the control (well, that's probably why they switched to Gitlab from other products), I wonder why they wanted to follow this approach in the first place. The good thing is that they almost always know how to take action when their community reacts.

akerro 7y ago

I'm happy to enable telemetry on my self-hosted Gitlab if that makes gitlab better, maybe make it opt-in instead opt-out?

foreign-inc 7y ago

How can you trust a company like GitLab whose default decision is always bad and then they change direction after public outcry. Either they don't think before they make decisions or they are just trying to figure out what they can get away with. This really shows their lack of morality. They kind of remind me of Facebook.

xiphias2 7y ago
How can you trust a company that does the same things behind closed doors? With GitLab we know about everything that's happening and can react before bad things happen. This is awesome.
techntoke 7y ago
Lol, I think you're forgetting about another provider. Besides you can always try Gitea.
- flukus 7y ago
  Is the on premise one different? The hosted one leaks data to google and cloudflare.

musicale 7y ago

> It shouldn’t have surprised us that you have strong feelings about opt-in/opt-out decisions Well yes, it should be obvious by now that requiring users to opt out to avoid some privacy-violating behavior is a facebook-class dark pattern.

notJim 7y ago

I find the anti-telemetry attitude honestly kind of confusing. I mean, you know that the shops you go to know what products you're buying from them, right? Presumably those shops look at that data in aggregate when thinking about which products to stock. How is this any different? If you're transacting with someone, it's not possible to hide that transaction from them. Of course you should have the right to have that data deleted, but that's different from saying it should never be collected at all. Also, given that nearly all websites are using something like Google Analytics or similar (or several of these at once), the reaction and vitriol here just seems weirdly disproportionate.

mkl 7y ago
Web tracking is different in that it's ongoing tracking of behaviour. When I buy something from a shop, that's the end of their knowledge: the shop has no idea what I use it for.
- notJim 7y ago
  Hmm, that must be where the breakdown is. It seems like you view just the transaction as your interaction with Gitlab, but to me if I'm on Gitlab, I'm still "in the shop" so to speak. So to me it's more like sitting in a coffee shop than going to the grocery store.
  - dx87 7y ago
    One of the big issues people had with the Gitlab proposal was that it was going to use 3rd party trackers, so Gitlab wouldn't have full control over your data. Some people were commenting that if the analytics data never left Gitlab, they wouldn't have an issue with it. They were also going to block access to your account until you accepted the tracking. Following the shopping analogy, it'd be like they let you in the store, but they won't let you leave with your purchase until you fill out a survey by a 3rd party company.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
  When you make non-cash purchases in a shop they sell your purchase data to an aggregator who adds it into their profile of you and derives demographic classifications from that. Single woman driving a Subaru? Your odds of being lesbian go up a few points. We'll target you for a certain form of advertising. This has been going on for decades. Before the web ever existed.

andrewbinstock 7y ago

>We have not yet added instrumentation to the Enterprise edition versions, and we will not do so until we have a way for self-hosted customers to opt out... (Scott Williamson, Gitlab VP of product, responding to the OP) That's not the right way to do it. Customers should need to opt in, rather than having to opt out.

segmondy 7y ago

This is just the beginning, at some point, they will flip. Google was our darling, that could do no wrong. Just imagine, to be bold and say "Don't be evil!" And then, what happened? This is just a short term reaction to quiet down the noise, but their long term hand has been exposed. They are not going to do it, but note that nothing says they won't try to or do it again in the far future. What I really will like to know is how they will profit off that data. Is it even going to make a bump on their bottom line?

deleted 7y ago
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mav3rick 7y ago
What happened ? Google is still one of the better players around. They pulled out of DoD contracts etc. This site just hates it for every single thing..it's just group think now , majority of the general public still loves it.
- pferde 7y ago
  Majority of the general public does definitely not love, nor hate Google. They are merely indifferent and tolerate it, just like they tolerate Microsoft, or more recently Facebook, despite all the flaws and annoyances their products have. The general public does not really care, they just want to get on with their lives.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  They trust lots of other companies more, including Amazon http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/americans-cant-agree-on-anything-except-loving-amazon.html http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/americans-cant-agree-...
  - mav3rick 7y ago
    No bathroom breaks and shitty benefits.

deleted 7y ago

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PacifyFish 7y ago

Maybe I've missed the boat, but what's the big deal about collecting telemetry? You already trust Gitlab with everything you store in Gitlab, like source code, which is presumably much more sensitive than the number of times you loaded a page or clicked on a button or whatever. Is it because the data would be stored with a third party, and you don't trust that third party? If Gitlab trusts the third party, and they're giving you the option to NOT trust the third party and only trust Gitlab, what's the issue?

sleepytimetea 7y ago
"in Gitlab" has 2 meanings - Gitlab cloud and Gitlab on-premises. For customers running off-the-grid or in countries with enhanced privacy (GPDR?) laws and restrictions on where their data lives, this is not what they signed up for. Nor was the timeline forced on them reasonable in any way. Imagine your Oracle software TOS says we will now export anonymized data from your SQL queries to somewhere out there in the cloud ? What if it was a HIPAA-compliant hospital datacenter ? We wouldn't want first-party telemetry either, we don't want _any_ data leaving our datacenter, period.

btashton 7y ago

Something a little ironic about putting a tracked click link in an email apologizing for adding tracking. That said I firmly believe in opt-in tracking and would likely enable it for my gitlab usage.

dreamcompiler 7y ago

I'm glad they reversed course and apologized but it still amazes me how powerful the reality distortion bubble can be even at well-meaning corporations. It's as if there was a meeting at the Red Cross where somebody said "Hey why don't we start selling guns? It would be a great fundraising tool." And everybody in the room just nodded and said "Yeah that's a pretty great idea. Let's start tomorrow!"

jamiequint 7y ago

This is incredibly dumb. Both Pendo and Snowplow are analytics providers, meaning they both have in their TOS that the company remains the owner of the data in question and that the services only exist to facilitate analysis of the data in question. Effectively this is users complaining that Gitlab wants to simplify their data analysis overhead. Presumably nothing precludes them from sending the exact same data to these companies and more on the backend. What do users expect? For Gitlab to build every single part of their stack in-house (CRM, analytics, support tooling, etc)? Because that's what this is effectively asking for. What's next? Protesting that a company uses RDS instead of their own hand-rolled Postgres setup? Because this is the same level of stupid.

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mobjack 7y ago
There is a lot of FUD whenever someone mentioned third party because many don't know the difference between a dedicated analytics provider and Facebook.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  How would you know a difference, how could you trust the difference (given the adtech industry being what it is), and how can you know things won't change over time? All that without being in a contractual relationship with that third party.
  - jamiequint 7y ago
    Are you in a contractual relationship with AWS for every service you use that uses AWS on the backend? How about Loggly? How about BigQuery/Snowflake? Intercom if they use that? Salesforce? Facebook and Google if they run ads? They may not do anything weird with your data now but how can you know that things won’t change over time?
    - 7y ago

OrgNet 7y ago

how did they get caught?

TeMPOraL 7y ago
They self-pwnd themselves. They posted a blog post saying that starting very soon, everyone will be getting third-party telemetry, self-hosted instances included.

AdrienLemaire 7y ago

Great attitude. Interesting correlation with the episode S06E01 of Silicon Valley released this week, on the same topic :)

koalaman 7y ago

How is this different from the telemetry that VS Code is collecting? The "community" seems to have swallowed that pill with much less complaining.

account42 7y ago
Is that the same community that is complaining now?

omani 7y ago

it still boggles my mind how one can use gitlab.

gorkemcetin 7y ago

Long story short, if Gitlab were to use a open source & self hosted platform (like Countly) with a clear mentioning of what to collect and what not, clarifying that nothing is collected which is not anything unknown to them, there would be no problems. Gitlab CEO has provided the right response with the right tone, which is something we don't usually see in big corps. I again would like to stress that such platforms not use 3rd party analytics providers but a self hosted and/or in-house solution.

sacrificedcapon 7y ago

Is it possible to enforce american spelling ( especially in the title )? Behavior vs Behaviour? HN is an american company and gitlab is an american company so people who participate here should use correct american spelling. The gitlab post itself uses the correct spelling - behavior. "In an effort to improve our user experience, we decided to implement user behavior tracking with both first and third-party technology"

samsari 7y ago
So if the subject on the story was a Swedish company you'd presumably be up here arguing that people who participate should use the correct Swedish spelling?

Yuval_Halevi 7y ago

I'm impressed by the way Gitlab is communicating on a personal level with all of their users on email bombs.

ptah 7y ago

I think it would be more acceptable if they let users preview the data sent

tachion 7y ago

Well, I suppose that's The Gitlab Drama for this quarter. /s

je42 7y ago

If i compare this to StackOverflows communication, I like this way a lot more.

techntoke 7y ago

This just tells me that someone needs to continue working on Gitea or another open source alternative so that you can easily self host something comparable to GitLab enterprise. Yes, GitLab has an open source CE version but it has limited functionality. If another open source solution can implement the same functionality as their enterprise product, then GitLab will be forced to adopt or risk losing their business. Time to put some pressure on them.

mbar84 7y ago

I'm normally one to hold a grudge. I still don't buy Sony products for something they did over a decade ago. In this case I think forgiveness is appropriate. There are obviously people working at Gitlab who have terrible ideas, but the organization seems to be able to deal with them in a healthy and transparent way. This compares favourably to companies like Zoom or Equifax.

grumpy-cowboy 7y ago

If I pay for a product (on-premise), it's not your business what I do with it. If I use the free hosted service (ex: gitlab.com), then this is the price to pay for a free service (within legal rules like GDPR). BTW, it's too late for me. I'm about to move all my stuff to a self-hosted Gitea (on a cheap VPS) in addition to Matrix, Mastodon, ...