9 ms·

We're currently using the starter edition for exactly one reason, ldap integration. Now we're supposed to pay $240 / employee for an ldap integration?! Not su

We're currently using the starter edition for exactly one reason, ldap integration. Now we're supposed to pay $240 / employee for an ldap integration?! Not sure what we'll do but I suspect scripting some ldap integration into our gitlab will be one of the best spent times in terms of ROI for me this year.

bearjaws 6y ago
$240 a year (per engineer) to keep your engineers focusing on providing product value is beyond paying for itself. Building custom in house tooling always costs 5x more than engineers believe, and ultimately doesn't improve your end product. This kind of tooling would probably require at least 100 engineers to justify the innate cost of building and maintaining it.
- tschellenbach 6y ago
  true in general and usually more than 5x. some teams manage to turn it into 10, 20 and 40x ldap integration sounds pretty simple though, so maybe not in this case
- whalesalad 6y ago
  $240/yr/employee for an LDAP connector is absolutely INSANE.
  - bearjaws 6y ago
    You get way more than LDAP connectivity...
    - FreeFull 6y ago
      Doesn't matter that you get more if you don't make use of it anyway.
      - nine_k 6y ago
        Plain LDAP auth is free. Advanced features that a big company might need are $240. Fine by me.
    - jeanjogr 6y ago
      If you only need that, all the extra stuff is useless.
- gpm 6y ago
  At 1000 engineers, that's a fulltime engineer to support the "ldap+gitlab community fork"... Realistically that takes a lot less than a fulltime engineer to support. Of course this assumes no other value is acquired from the license, but if we take the comment at face value it seems worthwhile to just add it yourself.
  - throw2838 6y ago
    Sounds like good side business idea. Good engineer could create it over weekend, than sell licenses and do support.
    - gpm 6y ago
      Seems somewhat unethical IMO (admittedly I'm not sure I can fully justify this feeling), and most good software engineers are paid enough to be able to be fairly ethical, but yes.
      - thisgoodlife 6y ago
        Quite the contrary, I consider it a good thing that someone is helping out those companies that gitlab is giving up.
        gpm 6y ago
        I guess something about competing with a group of people by using code that they almost exclusively developed feels wrong... but I'm not certain enough on this position to really argue it on the internet.
      - throw2838 6y ago
        Why unethical? Person has obligations to themselfs and their family, not to some corporation they do not even work for.
        gpm 6y ago
        I don't have a firm answer to this, it's more of a feeling that "this is wrong", but here are some possible arguments. I'm not sure they are the best possible arguments, but they're a quick first pass at making the argument. It is good for society as a whole if people release their work publicly/open source. People will only release their work publicly/open source if it doesn't substantially hurt their potential earnings. So it's best to avoid taking advantage of publicly released work in ways that hurts their earnings (all else being equal). Profit should go to the person who did the work making something. In this case gitlab did the work, and the person adding ldap here is almost entirely freeloading off of their work to make a profit. That isn't fair - especially when the freeloader has a direct negative impact on gitlab's earnings. The person adding ldap support is not doing useful work for society, rather they are just doing busy work to redirect a stream of money towards them, that's not good. And to add to all of these - the person doing this work is a competent engineer. They have lots of other ways to make money that are perfectly ethical, they do not need to resort to this.
- magicalhippo 6y ago
  > $240 a year (per engineer) That's a big part of the issue. It's not per engineer, as they don't allow mixing subscription levels. So it's per everyone that needs some access.
- roblabla 6y ago
  I've written my own gitlab-ldap integration when I was at a startup, done purely with the gitlab API and a cron job. It took me half a day, and didn't have to touch the script for the three years it was in production afterwards. So, no, this was absolutely productive. This isn't a particularly hard problem to solve.
forty 6y ago
We have made significant saving on another product by putting a proxy doing Saml authentication in front of the app, rather than paying a crazy price that would have gotten us the Saml. Probably tougher to do for gitlab though.
simplecto 6y ago
This is what we in the Enterprise Software business call inbound marketing. LOL This pretty much guarantees a phone call from your VP Engineering tag-teaming with the CFO.
koolba 6y ago
Why LDAP v.s. single sign with SAML?
vbrandl 6y ago
Not sure if there is any special LDAP functionality, I don't know of, but we use Gitlab CE with LDAP at work. Also looking at the feature comparison [0], I can't find any LDAP related features in the paid versions, that aren't available in the free version. Maybe the feature you are using has been moved to Gitlab CE. Then you can move to the free version. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparison/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...
- Grollicus 6y ago
  Look at [0], click at "compare more features" and search for ldap. For us it is mainly group sync and administrator sync that's missing. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
a1369209993 6y ago
You were paying 48$/employee for a LDAP integration?
- Grollicus 6y ago
  .. and happily so. We (few) devs like gitlab and it was a relatively cheap way to keep the devs happy. The feel-good factor about giving something back. Now it grows to a number that people will actually notice :/ Note that it's not the basic ldap authentication but ldap group sync and especially admin accounts in our case. Basic ldap auth works on the free plan. (ldap authed users take a subscription seat, which costs $0 on the free plan)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
alrs 6y ago
https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/authentication/#ldap-lightweight-directory-access-protocol https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/authentication/#ldap-lightweight...
- chr15m 6y ago
  Yep Gitea supports LDAP authentication out of the box. People often self-host Gitea but now there are a bunch of hosted-for-you gitea options like Digital Ocean, Cloudron, Stellarhosted and https://hostedgitea.com https://hostedgitea.com (disclaimer: I built hostedgitea.com).

bearjaws 6y ago

$240 a year (per engineer) to keep your engineers focusing on providing product value is beyond paying for itself. Building custom in house tooling always costs 5x more than engineers believe, and ultimately doesn't improve your end product. This kind of tooling would probably require at least 100 engineers to justify the innate cost of building and maintaining it.

tschellenbach 6y ago
true in general and usually more than 5x. some teams manage to turn it into 10, 20 and 40x ldap integration sounds pretty simple though, so maybe not in this case
whalesalad 6y ago
$240/yr/employee for an LDAP connector is absolutely INSANE.
- bearjaws 6y ago
  You get way more than LDAP connectivity...
  - FreeFull 6y ago
    Doesn't matter that you get more if you don't make use of it anyway.
    - nine_k 6y ago
      Plain LDAP auth is free. Advanced features that a big company might need are $240. Fine by me.
  - jeanjogr 6y ago
    If you only need that, all the extra stuff is useless.
gpm 6y ago
At 1000 engineers, that's a fulltime engineer to support the "ldap+gitlab community fork"... Realistically that takes a lot less than a fulltime engineer to support. Of course this assumes no other value is acquired from the license, but if we take the comment at face value it seems worthwhile to just add it yourself.
- throw2838 6y ago
  Sounds like good side business idea. Good engineer could create it over weekend, than sell licenses and do support.
  - gpm 6y ago
    Seems somewhat unethical IMO (admittedly I'm not sure I can fully justify this feeling), and most good software engineers are paid enough to be able to be fairly ethical, but yes.
    - thisgoodlife 6y ago
      Quite the contrary, I consider it a good thing that someone is helping out those companies that gitlab is giving up.
      - gpm 6y ago
        I guess something about competing with a group of people by using code that they almost exclusively developed feels wrong... but I'm not certain enough on this position to really argue it on the internet.
    - throw2838 6y ago
      Why unethical? Person has obligations to themselfs and their family, not to some corporation they do not even work for.
      - gpm 6y ago
        I don't have a firm answer to this, it's more of a feeling that "this is wrong", but here are some possible arguments. I'm not sure they are the best possible arguments, but they're a quick first pass at making the argument. It is good for society as a whole if people release their work publicly/open source. People will only release their work publicly/open source if it doesn't substantially hurt their potential earnings. So it's best to avoid taking advantage of publicly released work in ways that hurts their earnings (all else being equal). Profit should go to the person who did the work making something. In this case gitlab did the work, and the person adding ldap here is almost entirely freeloading off of their work to make a profit. That isn't fair - especially when the freeloader has a direct negative impact on gitlab's earnings. The person adding ldap support is not doing useful work for society, rather they are just doing busy work to redirect a stream of money towards them, that's not good. And to add to all of these - the person doing this work is a competent engineer. They have lots of other ways to make money that are perfectly ethical, they do not need to resort to this.
magicalhippo 6y ago
> $240 a year (per engineer) That's a big part of the issue. It's not per engineer, as they don't allow mixing subscription levels. So it's per everyone that needs some access.
roblabla 6y ago
I've written my own gitlab-ldap integration when I was at a startup, done purely with the gitlab API and a cron job. It took me half a day, and didn't have to touch the script for the three years it was in production afterwards. So, no, this was absolutely productive. This isn't a particularly hard problem to solve.

forty 6y ago

We have made significant saving on another product by putting a proxy doing Saml authentication in front of the app, rather than paying a crazy price that would have gotten us the Saml. Probably tougher to do for gitlab though.

simplecto 6y ago

This is what we in the Enterprise Software business call inbound marketing. LOL This pretty much guarantees a phone call from your VP Engineering tag-teaming with the CFO.

koolba 6y ago

Why LDAP v.s. single sign with SAML?

vbrandl 6y ago

Not sure if there is any special LDAP functionality, I don't know of, but we use Gitlab CE with LDAP at work. Also looking at the feature comparison [0], I can't find any LDAP related features in the paid versions, that aren't available in the free version. Maybe the feature you are using has been moved to Gitlab CE. Then you can move to the free version. [0]: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparison/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...

Grollicus 6y ago
Look at [0], click at "compare more features" and search for ldap. For us it is mainly group sync and administrator sync that's missing. [0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

a1369209993 6y ago

You were paying 48$/employee for a LDAP integration?

Grollicus 6y ago
.. and happily so. We (few) devs like gitlab and it was a relatively cheap way to keep the devs happy. The feel-good factor about giving something back. Now it grows to a number that people will actually notice :/ Note that it's not the basic ldap authentication but ldap group sync and especially admin accounts in our case. Basic ldap auth works on the free plan. (ldap authed users take a subscription seat, which costs $0 on the free plan)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

alrs 6y ago

https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/authentication/#ldap-lightweight-directory-access-protocol https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/authentication/#ldap-lightweight...

chr15m 6y ago
Yep Gitea supports LDAP authentication out of the box. People often self-host Gitea but now there are a bunch of hosted-for-you gitea options like Digital Ocean, Cloudron, Stellarhosted and https://hostedgitea.com https://hostedgitea.com (disclaimer: I built hostedgitea.com).