5 ms·

What is happening to GitLab? The site is littered with charts and nonsense business marketing lingo like "value stream management". The menu has a mysterious "s

by lxe 5y ago

What is happening to GitLab? The site is littered with charts and nonsense business marketing lingo like "value stream management". The menu has a mysterious "solutions" category, and I have to fill out a form to watch a demo video. What's next? Will I have to "download a whitepaper" PDF to look at "case studies" before I can understand what they're even offering?

andrewstuart2 5y ago
It's definitely getting a lot more marketing heavy lately. Which is unfortunate in my opinion, because there's really not a lot of selling you need to do when people have actually used the product. You can also start to see more of the monetization strategies coming into play. More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. This is also still fine with me, because the open core product is still so dang far ahead than the competition when it comes to total feature set, and I still feel like the way they stratify features makes sense. If you're not a big enterprise, most of the paid features aren't all that important to you yet. And I absolutely understand that as a company they want to make money, and grow. I love GitLab. I use it every day, and I tell other people and companies that they should use it. I will definitely say, however, that I'm counting these as orange-ish flags. Maybe not red, but also not green or yellow. I worry about whether the feature development will continue to be developer-oriented or if like Slack, it will shift to "whatever sells more licenses to large enterprise CEOs."
- leipert 5y ago
  > More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. If you tally the features per release, still more features are being added to Core: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-is-new-since/?tab=stats https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-i... (Disclaimer: GitLab employee and co-author of that overview)
- indigochill 5y ago
  Yeah, the excellent open core is the #1 reason I evangelize for Gitlab to colleagues as well. It's a guarantee that even if Gitlab turns fully user-hostile tomorrow (which I do not expect at all, but just saying, worst case), we can carry on unaffected on the self-hosted open core, which will doubtless be carried on by someone else in that eventuality. Plus, the scope of its features is incredible. My team uses the community edition and our peer teams use a different stack of three different licensed proprietary vendors just to do the same thing we're able to do on the open core. I had a funny conversation the other day where someone from those teams was looking at buying a license for a new package management system. When I pointed out Gitlab could do what he needed, he said, "Yeah, but we already have these other two vendors for source control and CI". To which I thought, "Sure, so you could drop both of them, too." But I can appreciate once a team's built momentum on one stack, interrupting that is probably usually more trouble than it's worth.
- Lorin 5y ago
  They provide additional features from the 'paid' tiers if you are hosting public groups/repositories - and open source projects can apply for additional freebies/discounting.
devmunchies 5y ago
> What's next? Will I have to "download a whitepaper" PDF at the bottom there's a "Free eBook: A beginner's guide to GitOps" that requires filling out a form to download
- tnolet 5y ago
  You are witnessing the move from "developer love" to "enterprise $$" It's a very, very hard thing to balance, as shown by the comments here. Personally, I think they are doing an OK job on this.
- sigzero 5y ago
  I tried. It is broken (at least for me).
toomanyducks 5y ago
It's really frustrating because the technical stuff is actually really cool! I like automating what I can! Gitlab provides a ton of tools for that, and it's fantastic! But it becomes increasingly hard to figure out, not imo because the features are poorly designed or implemented, but because it's marketing over substance. I keep getting told the effects of what I can do with Feature X, but never what Feature X actually does. Maybe it's time for me to learn the pure git and email workflow.
thayne 5y ago
This doesn't look like a normal release announcement. It's has a bunch of marketing fluff, but I don't really know what is new in gitlab 14.
- john_cogs 5y ago
  Hey there, I addressed that in this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714800
tester756 5y ago
>The menu has a mysterious "solutions" category What's so mysterious about it?
amelius 5y ago
It was never a good idea to centralize a decentralized source revision control system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916
- RichardCA 5y ago
  Git supports a wide variety of deployment architectures. Centralized hub-and-spoke just happens to be one of them.
mikepurvis 5y ago
I have no interest in any of the ticketing/workflow/pm features (JIRA shop), nor am I interested in the container or package registries (Artifactory). I just use GitLab for the code repository, review, and CI stuff, and while those basic features do still get love, it's frustrating to have the Starter plan dropped so that the only paid option is 4x the price and the banner features are all stuff I don't care about.
EugeneOZ 5y ago
Gitlab was always trash. Place with 6 managers per programmer.
- thiagocsf 5y ago
  I’m not sure where the “trash” comment comes from but you can check for yourself the engineer:manager ratio: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/. It’s not 6:1. (Disclaimer: am engineering manager at GitLab)
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    My condolences, lol.
  - EugeneOZ 5y ago
    Trash comment comes from the fact that Gitlab was always pathetically SLOW trash. Performance is legendary awful. You should be proud.
unilynx 5y ago
I fear most core features are done - the basics (CI, issues, merges) work very nicely, even though a bit spartan at some points, but it's not enough for Gitlab's sales to be where it needs to be. So to me it feels like Gitlab is now look for a problem to solve, which actually makes the product more confusing and less compelling unless you buy into their whole story I wouldn't be surprised if at some point something like Gitea (no personal experience with it) will close the gap sufficiently for a lot of users to switch there, especially as the gitlab upgrade cycle becomes more tiring without seeming to add anything of real value (I know I'm just a freeloader with gitlab CE, but at this point the only reason to upgrade is the monthly security vulnerability, and I just pray it hits sufficiently far away from the 22nd of the month that all the update bugs have been ironed out again)
- donmcronald 5y ago
  I switched to Gitea a year or two ago. GitLab was getting too heavy for me. I felt like I was building development process instead of software. Gitea gets out of the way and I don’t miss any features. Gitea just added push mirroring, so my favorite new thing is to develop via Gitea and push to GitHub for actions or things like Cloudflare pages deployment. I pledge / donate to bounties for Gitea with the Starter $ I was willing to give GitLab.
- sdesol 5y ago
  > I wouldn't be surprised if at some point something like Gitea (no personal experience with it) will close the gap sufficiently for a lot of users to switch there Gitea is a weird one for me and I've been studying the Git code hosting space for probably a decade now. In the last year, they have what appears to be 7 core contributors: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C50%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Ago-gitea%2Fgitea&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... where 4 must be working on this full-time or doing a lot of extra work outside of their day to day job. Gitea appears to be funded by opensource contributions https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea but the amount there doesn't seem like it would be enough to really push development forward fast enough to become a serious alternative for enterprise. Gitea though, is significantly more active than Gogs, which it forked from: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C50%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Agogs%2Fgogs&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... which is very much a one person operation for the most part. Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool that is being linked
codegeek 5y ago
Welcome to VC Money. The pressure to grow faster may be heating up.
sytse 5y ago
We try to appeal to different audiences with different content. The developer focused post for this release was published on the same date on https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...

by lxe 5y ago

andrewstuart2 5y ago

It's definitely getting a lot more marketing heavy lately. Which is unfortunate in my opinion, because there's really not a lot of selling you need to do when people have actually used the product. You can also start to see more of the monetization strategies coming into play. More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. This is also still fine with me, because the open core product is still so dang far ahead than the competition when it comes to total feature set, and I still feel like the way they stratify features makes sense. If you're not a big enterprise, most of the paid features aren't all that important to you yet. And I absolutely understand that as a company they want to make money, and grow. I love GitLab. I use it every day, and I tell other people and companies that they should use it. I will definitely say, however, that I'm counting these as orange-ish flags. Maybe not red, but also not green or yellow. I worry about whether the feature development will continue to be developer-oriented or if like Slack, it will shift to "whatever sells more licenses to large enterprise CEOs."

leipert 5y ago
> More and more features are being added to the paid versions than core. If you tally the features per release, still more features are being added to Core: https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-is-new-since/?tab=stats https://gitlab-com.gitlab.io/cs-tools/gitlab-cs-tools/what-i... (Disclaimer: GitLab employee and co-author of that overview)
indigochill 5y ago
Yeah, the excellent open core is the #1 reason I evangelize for Gitlab to colleagues as well. It's a guarantee that even if Gitlab turns fully user-hostile tomorrow (which I do not expect at all, but just saying, worst case), we can carry on unaffected on the self-hosted open core, which will doubtless be carried on by someone else in that eventuality. Plus, the scope of its features is incredible. My team uses the community edition and our peer teams use a different stack of three different licensed proprietary vendors just to do the same thing we're able to do on the open core. I had a funny conversation the other day where someone from those teams was looking at buying a license for a new package management system. When I pointed out Gitlab could do what he needed, he said, "Yeah, but we already have these other two vendors for source control and CI". To which I thought, "Sure, so you could drop both of them, too." But I can appreciate once a team's built momentum on one stack, interrupting that is probably usually more trouble than it's worth.
Lorin 5y ago
They provide additional features from the 'paid' tiers if you are hosting public groups/repositories - and open source projects can apply for additional freebies/discounting.

devmunchies 5y ago

> What's next? Will I have to "download a whitepaper" PDF at the bottom there's a "Free eBook: A beginner's guide to GitOps" that requires filling out a form to download

tnolet 5y ago
You are witnessing the move from "developer love" to "enterprise $$" It's a very, very hard thing to balance, as shown by the comments here. Personally, I think they are doing an OK job on this.
sigzero 5y ago
I tried. It is broken (at least for me).

toomanyducks 5y ago

It's really frustrating because the technical stuff is actually really cool! I like automating what I can! Gitlab provides a ton of tools for that, and it's fantastic! But it becomes increasingly hard to figure out, not imo because the features are poorly designed or implemented, but because it's marketing over substance. I keep getting told the effects of what I can do with Feature X, but never what Feature X actually does. Maybe it's time for me to learn the pure git and email workflow.

thayne 5y ago

This doesn't look like a normal release announcement. It's has a bunch of marketing fluff, but I don't really know what is new in gitlab 14.

john_cogs 5y ago
Hey there, I addressed that in this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714800 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27714800

tester756 5y ago

>The menu has a mysterious "solutions" category What's so mysterious about it?

amelius 5y ago

It was never a good idea to centralize a decentralized source revision control system. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19367916

RichardCA 5y ago
Git supports a wide variety of deployment architectures. Centralized hub-and-spoke just happens to be one of them.

mikepurvis 5y ago

I have no interest in any of the ticketing/workflow/pm features (JIRA shop), nor am I interested in the container or package registries (Artifactory). I just use GitLab for the code repository, review, and CI stuff, and while those basic features do still get love, it's frustrating to have the Starter plan dropped so that the only paid option is 4x the price and the banner features are all stuff I don't care about.

EugeneOZ 5y ago

Gitlab was always trash. Place with 6 managers per programmer.

thiagocsf 5y ago
I’m not sure where the “trash” comment comes from but you can check for yourself the engineer:manager ratio: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/. It’s not 6:1. (Disclaimer: am engineering manager at GitLab)
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  My condolences, lol.
- EugeneOZ 5y ago
  Trash comment comes from the fact that Gitlab was always pathetically SLOW trash. Performance is legendary awful. You should be proud.

unilynx 5y ago

I fear most core features are done - the basics (CI, issues, merges) work very nicely, even though a bit spartan at some points, but it's not enough for Gitlab's sales to be where it needs to be. So to me it feels like Gitlab is now look for a problem to solve, which actually makes the product more confusing and less compelling unless you buy into their whole story I wouldn't be surprised if at some point something like Gitea (no personal experience with it) will close the gap sufficiently for a lot of users to switch there, especially as the gitlab upgrade cycle becomes more tiring without seeming to add anything of real value (I know I'm just a freeloader with gitlab CE, but at this point the only reason to upgrade is the monthly security vulnerability, and I just pray it hits sufficiently far away from the 22nd of the month that all the update bugs have been ironed out again)

donmcronald 5y ago
I switched to Gitea a year or two ago. GitLab was getting too heavy for me. I felt like I was building development process instead of software. Gitea gets out of the way and I don’t miss any features. Gitea just added push mirroring, so my favorite new thing is to develop via Gitea and push to GitHub for actions or things like Cloudflare pages deployment. I pledge / donate to bounties for Gitea with the Starter $ I was willing to give GitLab.
sdesol 5y ago
> I wouldn't be surprised if at some point something like Gitea (no personal experience with it) will close the gap sufficiently for a lot of users to switch there Gitea is a weird one for me and I've been studying the Git code hosting space for probably a decade now. In the last year, they have what appears to be 7 core contributors: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C50%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Ago-gitea%2Fgitea&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... where 4 must be working on this full-time or doing a lot of extra work outside of their day to day job. Gitea appears to be funded by opensource contributions https://opencollective.com/gitea https://opencollective.com/gitea but the amount there doesn't seem like it would be enough to really push development forward fast enough to become a serious alternative for enterprise. Gitea though, is significantly more active than Gogs, which it forked from: https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impact&q=commit-changes%3A%3C50%2Bwindow%3A365&r=github%3Agogs%2Fgogs&v=repo https://public-001.gitsense.com/insights/github/repos?p=impa... which is very much a one person operation for the most part. Disclaimer: I'm the creator of the tool that is being linked

codegeek 5y ago

Welcome to VC Money. The pressure to grow faster may be heating up.

sytse 5y ago

We try to appeal to different audiences with different content. The developer focused post for this release was published on the same date on https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-released/ https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2021/06/22/gitlab-14-0-rel...