4 ms·

$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 cost

$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.

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.