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Gitlab Explores Sale
- itake 2y agoI know it’s just business, but I still have a chip on my shoulder for gitlab’s low equity packages
- j45 2y agoI think the post is about the customer perspective
- officialchicken 2y ago[flagged]
- orf 2y agoIf you're small enough to be able to migrate away from Gitlab in a single day then you're not contributing to anyone's bottom line.
- laserlight 2y agoThe fact that GitLab continues to serve them tells me that they are more likely, than not, to be contributing to the bottom line.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- richardwhiuk 2y agoThey could be a loss leader.
- lolinder 2y agoGitLab fired all their loss leaders as customers years ago when they eliminated every small and middle tier from their payment plans.
- officialchicken 2y agoAre you exploring buying GitLab?
- lewispollard 2y agoDid you mistake the hacker news comment box for a private email?
- orf 2y agoSure, why not
- wg0 2y agoThat's insulting, factual and hilarious at the same time.
- wdfx 2y agoIf this news elicits such a strong reaction as this, it makes me wonder why you are even using Gitlab right now, if there is even any likelyhood of such an outcome?
- officialchicken 2y ago[flagged]
- gibs0ns 2y agoStop being weird.
- hankchinaski 2y agoSir, this is a Wendy’s
- omidontop 2y agoA sad day for small businesses and software developers.
- frognumber 2y agoThis seems like a dead-end purchase. I like both companies, but there is strongly negative synergy. I'm sure there's some vision behind it, but like most such purchases, one side or both will likely crash-and-burn. That would be sad. Aside from technology issues, the companies have a completely different culture and ethos. Universally, that's not preserved in acquisitions like these. Gitlab has a very unique culture of transparency, remote work, etc. which won't mesh at all with Datadog. If the goal is some kind of integration, a much better model is a significant investment and partnership agreement. It's possible to have those permanently binding, while still being attached at the hip.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nickorlow 2y agoYeah I don't see how gitlab fits nicely into Datadog's business. Maybe they just want some foothold in developer tooling (similar to Microsoft's moves with GitHub and NPM)?
- deng 2y agoWell, one thing they have in common: both are insanely expensive.
- bdcravens 2y agoIf they become part of Datadog, that kills the likelihood of doing business with anyone who as had a bad experience with DD (I'm in that camp)
- mosh6 2y agoThere's no transparency since they were going IPO. Being transparent is just a storytelling
- re-thc 2y agoWould be great if Alphabet buys them i.e. integrate it into Google Cloud.
- rkachowski 2y agoA new google tombstone would be super exciting indeed
- 15155 2y agoRemember Google Code?
- azornathogron 2y agoGoogle had a code hosting service (free for open source projects) with repo, issue tracker, and wiki. But it was shut down in 2016. Now there is just an archive: https://code.google.com/archive/ https://code.google.com/archive/
- pelagicAustral 2y agoIt was horrendous, looked legacy since day 1. Gitlab has so much more to offer...
- elbowjack65 2y agoCoincidentally, Google is shutting down Google Source repositories in GCP today. https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/docs https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/docs
- nubinetwork 2y agoYeah, uh, no. They'll just kill it like everything else. https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
- lvncelot 2y agoThat's just taking it out back and shooting it with extra steps.
- lijok 2y agoAnyone keeping count on which cycle of “I’m switching to Git{Hub|Lab}” this puts us?
- edvards 2y agoTime for Gitea.
- Macha 2y agoHonestly, Gitea have started on the open core route, I'm skipping over them and have gone to Forgejo
- nicce 2y agoYeah, Gitea is now owned by for-profit company, decided without any communication with the community. Forgejo is the non-profit fork. See: https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/ https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
- srameshc 2y agoI really wanted Gitlab to succeed. I joined early on and used it quite a bit but by 2020 things changed and their message , pricing was all mess. I don't think I have ever used it since. But this was one startup I really rooted for.
- setopt 2y agoI put most of my open-source repos there for a few years, and got GitLab adopted at work too. They had similar feature set to GitHub and I didn’t want to support the latter’s near-monopoly status. After Microsoft bought GitHub and many large projects started migrating to GitLab (e.g. GNOME), I thought things were looking better. But a few years in… I’ve given up and moved my repos to GitHub a year ago. It’s clear that my GitLab repos have nearly no visibility, and if no one finds the projects then there’s not much point in open sourcing it.
- nine_k 2y agoA number of projects have read-only mirrors on GitHub for visibility, with actual development occurring elsewhere.
- kryptiskt 2y agoI thought eliminating the cheap plan was a huge mistake. You can say that people shouldn't balk at paying $20 a month, but Github offers a plan for $4 per user, why should they pay more and all they get is features they don't intend to use? Ceding the entire low ground like that is shortsighted, especially since Github has an advantage in selling the same users an expensive plan if and when they need it.
- aniforprez 2y agoWe'd evaluated GitLab a while back for a previous company before GitHub Actions was launched because the CI coming in with GitLab was very tempting. Since we were a small team working with contractors, we were looking for a monthly subscription and were pretty shocked at immediately being rebuffed and asked to book annually. Genuinely insane at the time how insistent they were that we should simply pay up front for an entire year of seats that were likely never going to be used. We just went with GitHub Their extreme focus on enterprise is probably the reason for the low traction they're getting. Can't believe how much money they're leaving on the table because of some of their more bone headed decisions. Not sure if that ever changed
- altdataseller 2y agoCan anyone tell me why someone would pay nosebleed prices for Gitlab when they could simply use Github? Like do they have some special use case that github doesn’t support? Do Gitlab customers just love giving away lots of money? Do they want to pay a premium just to feel “special”? Like what am I missing?
- Hamuko 2y agoFor us, it's mainly for legacy reasons. We used to have a self-hosted GitLab instance as a fledling company and then switched to SaaS GitLab after the company grew and IT spent too much time maintaining it, with an Ultimate subscription to get access to the security tools. If this was my company, we would be on GitHub since GitLab Ultimate is super fucking expensive and those security tools are buggy as hell. Not sure if the GitHub ones are any better, but surely they can't be worse. Granted, I don't know how much we actually pay since Ultimate price these days is "contact sales", but I'm pretty sure it used to be like $99/user/month. (We also wouldn't be paying for Jira on top of GitLab/GitHub.)
- Aeolun 2y agoGithub Advanced Security is $79/user per month (on top of $21/user per month for enterprise edition), but is actually really good. I’ve considered buying it for my own private repositories because it’s so nice (yes, a single person enterprise account is fine with Github too, and you can pay monthly). I… used to like Gitlab, but it’s like they lost their way a few years ago and now I’d never recommend them.
- xyst 2y agoThis is like one of those drunken hookups at the end of a night. Then when you wake up in the morning, there’s a sense of uneasiness and regret upon sobering up. I sense a Datadog acquisition will likely fall through or somebody else will buy it. I really don’t understand how a cloud monitoring firm would stand to benefit from a code repository firm. - ‘free’ monitoring with your GL hosted app. Get them hooked and vendor locked, and now you have a customer for life?
- altdataseller 2y agoWouldn’t having insights into the stack used by a company help with cross selling their monitoring suite? Example: if a company is committing code that is heavily involved with Redis, Datadog could come in and say “hey, need to monitor memory usage of your Redis clusters? We got a solution for that” Just playing devils advocate
- eschneider 2y agoSo...hosting company analyzing code to see what what they can market to me? Ewww.
- snapcaster 2y agoThis would create a lot of backlash in my company
- another2another 2y agoI think a better fit (for any measure of better you might like) might be Redhat / IBM. IBM can sell it to customers as an Enterprise package with Enterprise support, and Redhat can host their own OSS software there on their own turf.
- arnvald 2y agoAgreed, similarly to what they're doing with Hashicorp (though way to early to say if it works out for both sides in the end)
- rwmj 2y agoRed Hat uses Gitlab for CentOS Stream development (https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream https://gitlab.com/redhat/centos-stream). However $8bn is a lot of money for what is basically a loss-making cost center. (I know it made a small profit recently, but Gitlab has lost money for a very very long time.)
- barfbagginus 2y ago[dead]
- neilv 2y agoWhat is motivating a sale? And how would that sale work? (Does it involve different classes of shares?)
- 999900000999 2y agohttps://siliconangle.com/2024/06/03/gitlab-delivers-strong-earnings-beat-raises-guidance-investors-unimpressed/#:~:text=That%20earnings%20beat%20came%20on,to%20profitability%2C%20instead%20going%20backwards https://siliconangle.com/2024/06/03/gitlab-delivers-strong-e.... Looks like they aren't profitable, they lack a real moat. Literally anyone can just spin up a competing service. I'm actually surprised GitHub/Microsoft hasn't eaten their lunch yet. Gitlab used to have a firm advantage in terms of build runners, but GitHub Actions have been out for a while. I strongly suspect GitHub loses money ( of course you pay in other ways, wouldn't surprise me if GitHub actively blocks other LLMs from scrapping public repos while allowing co pilot to.). How can anyone compete against a trillion dollar company that's fine with subsidizing an unprofitable business line? Ultimately I don't think Gitlab or anything like it can hope to actually make money. I'm open to being wrong through.
- Uvix 2y agoGitHub certainly isn’t making money on their open source hosting, but that’s what the enterprise side is for.
- guappa 2y agoI doubt it actually makes money there either.
- lucideer 2y ago> I'm actually surprised GitHub/Microsoft hasn't eaten their lunch yet. It's not for lack of trying. GitHub are aggressively pursuing the enterprise market from a sales perspective but there's been three problems with their approach: 1. They're pushing SaaS over on-prem: enterprise services in general are trending this way, but it only really works when you're in a dominant position - like e.g. Atlassian - when you're competing it's going to leave you with less leverage with potential clients. 2. They're leaning very heavily on AI - this is a double-edged sword as it's currently selling well to clients as a pitch but anyone doing functional evaluations is looking at benchmarks & it's not really mature enough to deliver there. 3. They're iterating really slowly on their roadmap. This seems to be GitHub's (not Microsoft's) typical approach, which I'm honestly a big fan of, but when you're entering a market with existing mature players it's going to slow down sales. I do think GitHub will ultimately take over - it'll just happen slower than expected.
- boscillator 2y agoIt's a shame that Gitlab isn't profitable. Maybe it's just because I have to use it for work and am therefor familiar, but I've always slightly preferred it to Github. I also never really saw Github enterprise server being viable in the "we have to self host for security reasons" space, but maybe someone else has a different view.
- pm90 2y agoWe ran github enterprise on our infra for several years. It was a pretty low overhead thing to run except if you’re really big. The nice thing was that we could customize the api rate limits which is really annoying with saas github.
- lvncelot 2y agoThe CI/CD alone in Gitlab is light years ahead of what Github has to offer. I'm really hoping that they can hold on in some way or that the core open source application stays viable.
- orf 2y agoHow is it light years ahead? I feel exactly the opposite way
- lvncelot 2y agoIt's way more powerful. Something like dynamically generated child pipelines doesn't even have any equivalent in GitHub Actions.
- orf 2y agoTrue, however on the other hand something truly basic like “not spending time re-compressing and re-uploading a cache after a cache hit”, “use zstd with caches”, or even “add fucking timestamps to CI logs” doesn’t even have any equivalent in Gitlab CI. Some might even say dynamically generating child pipelines, while cool, is a niche bandaid for some of the legacy tempting baggage they are unable to escape from that dramatically increases pipeline complexity whilst common use cases are still broken and still underserved. It’s a janky pile of unnamespaced, hard to debug and fragile YAML-template-meta-programming hacks. Light years my ass.
- wg0 2y agoDatadog is going to milk the cow because I don't see what else are they going to use this except push their monitoring solution to the GitLab enterprise customer base or jack the prices to recoup the investment. Also - wondering what will the commerce look like in 500 years when everyone has bought each other over multiple generations.
- shitlord 2y agoA more optimistic view of the situation is that Datadog is already in the monitoring business and wants to go after the rest of the SDLC. There's certainly some value in correlating code changes with incidents.
- elashri 2y agoI really hope that whoever buys them not to shut it down / change model. At CERN we rely on Gitlab enterprise and I have many CI files that would take weeks to re-write into GitHub actions (there are thousands for CERN overall). We are still suffering from RedHat decision to cut CentOS after relying on it and Fermilab/CERN shutting down Scientific Linux based on the assumption that CentOS is suitable. It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time. Although there are many examples on how proprietary hurt us too (I see you there oracle).
- jamescrowley 2y agoIn case you are not aware, there is tooling to help with GitLab to GitHub actions migration, but I have not tested on anything complex so YMMV https://docs.github.com/en/actions/migrating-to-github-actions/automated-migrations/migrating-from-gitlab-with-github-actions-importer#perform-a-dry-run-migration-of-a-gitlab-pipeline https://docs.github.com/en/actions/migrating-to-github-actio...
- janice1999 2y ago> It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time. I think it's still the less risky option. Open Source at least usually makes migrating elsewhere easier. CentoOS -> AlmaLinux for example (or any of the other commercially supported CentOS replacements). Customers currently being exploited by Broadcom/VMware wish they had such options.
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago> It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time. Although there are many examples on how proprietary hurt us too (I see you there oracle). Surely FOSS is overwhelmingly preferable precisely for this reason - if you use github and they decide to screw you over you're stuck. If gitlab does decide to screw you over then you still have the source code for the last good version, and 1. you can patch/fork it yourselves, 2. you can hire someone else to patch/fork it, and 3. if there's a decent-size community then probably someone else will fork it. Or more concretely, yeah the CentOS thing sucked, but there are multiple replacement forks, which never would have been an option if it wasn't open source.
- penguin_booze 2y agoI'm interested in hearing why one choose a Gitlab on-perm instance vs. a Gerrit + Jenkins system.
- Aeolun 2y agoHave you ever used Jenkins? Even if I don’t like Gitlab I’d choose it over Jenkins any day of the week. It’s not strictly terrible, just ancient. Like you are trying to drag 2000’s enterprise software through the intervening 20 years and make it work for today.
- penguin_booze 2y agoI've indeed used Jenkins. For all my professional uses, it served perfectly well. Newer releases come with pipeline and k8s support etc., so I'm not of the opinion that just being ancient is a disqualifier.
- gsaslis 2y agoagreed. Jenkins has suffered from a lot of problems - plugin maintenance across version upgrades being key - but it has also overcome a lot of these problems. It gets criticism just for being... "old". But it is an automation server that is as battle-tested as they come! Also, being old gives it a huge advantage: you can bet you won't need a major rewrite of your pipelines in a couple of years when e.g. GitLab sells, or Microsoft decides GH actions aren't so free (or fast) any more, etc.
- Aeolun 2y agoJust being ancient is not, but it shines through in every single thing that’s there. Building the pipelines, configuring the jobs. If I compare the ergonomics if Github Actions and Jenkins it’s light and day. For me anyway. If you like jenkins I won’t stop you from using it ;)
- gavinhoward 2y agoWelp, time to quickly implement my ideas for a GitHub-in-a-box, just in time to steal newly disgruntled GitLab customers.
- everfrustrated 2y agoDatadog is the new Cisco
- PrivateButts 2y agoI would love to give Gitlab money, we live out of it at work, but charging a per user cost for self hosted instances is insane. I have budget to spend, but I can't justify $30 per seat per software per month, especially if I'm the one hosting it.
- nashashmi 2y agoInstead of selling itself, it should buy sourceforge. That will be one quick step to becoming a replacement to github with a network purchase. The ads are just cherry top. Secondly, acquire an issue tracker software. With a huge base of private developers, project management software is a step over. Thirdly, launch a news media site like download.com. Investment price: $300 million + 400$ million plus $40 million. Return on investment: $24 Billion market cap. x3
- commandersaki 2y agoHope Sid comes out with a full recovery. I love that he engages with HN, though maybe that's dropped off when GitLab went public.
- gsaslis 2y agoI have to say "Datadog" isn't exactly as scary as "Microsoft" was, back when it bought GitHub. Ok, they didn't kill the open source community which is what we feared at the time (because they found a way to make more money from it), but I'm still more skeptical of Microsoft essentially controlling the world's open source software than Datadog buying an open core company. But with Microsoft now painting everything with its "AI" brush, aren't you, as open source maintainers, concerned about keeping the world's FOSS on a proprietary platform?
- bhjgjy 2y ago[flagged]
- apple4ever 2y agoSo all the things they've been doing haven't been to improve their product, but just to make a ton of money. It certainly explains why they've been adding all these odd features instead of fixing their current ones. Sad though.