5 ms·

There's Almost No Gitlab

38 points by physicsguy 2y ago

lnxg33k1 2y ago
I don’t know, I’ve worked in companies using GitHub having to halt everything twice per month due to GitHub outage,and some other Doing pretty well with self hosted GitLab inside a vpn, factor the cost of having the devs stopping twice a month in the cost of GitHub.
- szajbus 2y ago
  That's anectdotal. I'd argue that the risk of your own instance being inaccessible for whatever reason is significantly higher than GitHub or GitLab having a full outage.
f1shy 2y ago
Excellent read of how things go in the EU about SW. Some places are different, in Germany the LOVE to put price to the hour, but still don't see that technical debt will have interest to be pay at the end.
- whilenot-dev 2y ago
  It's not about pricing at all, GitHub is way more attractive with just 4$/user/month. I think the predominant factor is data governance and information privacy. A self-hosted GitLab instance is mostly good enough, until you don't want to self-host it anymore and change to a cloud hosting service of your choice. It's just that not a lot of privacy aware people want to pay Microsoft for playing around with their data.
  - rawfan 2y ago
    Price is not everything. My company has Gitlab licenses as a part of a larger Microsoft enterprise agreement/partnership but we still pay for GitLab Ultimate and use that as a default for all developers.
  - pjerem 2y ago
    SE in France, 10y+ experience. I’ve never seen a company choosing those tools with any consideration for privacy or security or for any given reason. In all of the companies I worked, the "basic" tools (aka mostly GitHub, Google Workspace, Jira, Slack etc …) were all just default choices from the era when the company was fund and then those things just became the base bricks of thousands of internal procedures and scripts and once the company is at cruise speed, nobody will want to change any of those tools even if "better" (for whatever definition) or cheaper tools exists. Because it’s just too hard. And somehow, by some amazing magic I don’t understand, at some point, people are happy with the fragile stack of hacked things running on top of 4 or 5 extremely "shitty" (for whatever definition) products that you can’t cancel.
    - whilenot-dev 2y ago
      SE in Austria and Switzerland, 10y+ experience. I won't disagree with your assessment that the tech stack changes rarely or ever, but newly founded companies are still picking GitLab fairly often. AFAICS every business wants their tech stack "moved to the cloud", but infra people weight the costs and still have good contacts to local data centers from the pre-cloud-era - you know, contacts with a phone numbers and human support. Those data centers made it a business to run GitLab instances for you, among other things. A lot of businesses choose a discounter like Hetzner first and then move to one of those when support matters. That is mostly the best overall price (direct and indicrect costs) for the offered value, data governance included.
Kelteseth 2y ago
The weirdest thing is when I search for GitLab integration or bots, but I _always_ see them hosted on Github. Maybe this is just because GitLab has still god awful Google indexing.
not_your_vase 2y ago
So you evidently see a demand for Gitlab support (you can barely reject the requests at the same rate they come), at the same time you claim that there is simply no market for it?
- Jweb_Guru 2y ago
  Yeah, this is a very strange article that completely contradicts its headline.
  - lnxg33k1 2y ago
    I start to recognise idiots when they start talking about absolute stuff, like "freedom of speech means you can say everything" or "developers don't know anything about X" this confirms my rule
- davedx 2y ago
  I think the argument is supposed to be about ROI but it didn't really drive the point home: They don't want to invest in integrating their product in Gitlab, because it's 1/4 the size of Github and they see trends pointing to a Github resurgence. If you have limited resources to build integrations then sure, I guess?
- bakugo 2y ago
  Seems like a classic case of someone making a decision based purely on personal opinion (I don't want to support Gitlab because I don't like it) and then working backwards in an attempt to find arguments to support that decision (and really struggling in this case, "50% of the developers I spoke to used Gitlab, but Github's profits are higher so clearly Gitlab is irrelevant" is particularly egregious)
- ho_schi 2y ago
  Sounds to me like We don’t support Linux because the low marketshare on sales. Because you don’t provide a native port, support and don’t even sale? Which is why your own special MBA market sales don’t change. And that why a lot of people suffer from bad software - it was the first known and they don’t think in long term. PS: GitHub is usually not an option for closed-source software. Not because of the uncertain development of the fees. Microsoft’s security track - especially for the cloud - is bad. And if you lock yourself to cloud services you end up in vendor lock-in. And that’s also open-source projects tend to Gitlab and others. As usual, GitHub was the first big player.
vbezhenar 2y ago
Same in my work. We would happily spend weeks settings things up and then hours maintaining it over months, without proper backups and with abysmal security, just to save few hundreds of bucks. I never understood that attitude, but I'm not the one who makes financial decision and tinkering with stuff is somewhat fun for me, so I don't really complain.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Even then, GitLab is super heavyweight compared to just running Gitea. Gitea is a million times easier to set up.
  - arcanemachiner 2y ago
    Chiming in to request HN's current take on Gitea vs. Forgejo.
    - agile-gift0262 2y ago
      I think they are both great choices and it's a matter of personal preference. Do you distrust the new for-profit company that owns Gitea? Do you believe that all software should be libre? Choose Forgejo. Do you believe having a for-profit company behind gives the project more budget for feature development? Do you think that using a GPLv3 licensed software is problematic in legal terms? Choose Gitea.
  - p4bl0 2y ago
    Does Gitea offer features like continuous integration, pages, user permission management, etc?
    - duskwuff 2y ago
      > continuous integration Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview > pages No, but if you have some sort of static content hosting set up (like a S3 bucket), it shouldn't be difficult to set up publishing to that with actions. It's also got project wikis built in. > user permission management Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/permissions https://docs.gitea.com/usage/permissions
tayo42 2y ago
Poor gitlab marketing team having to deal with an blog post like this on the front page of this site lol Side comment to the screenshotted tweet. You can like open source with out making commits. It's nice to just be able to read the code or take something and just run it or fork it privately
bakugo 2y ago
Don't really see what point is being made here. No real criticisms of Gitlab itself, just someone being weirdly upset about being asked to support more than 1 git hosting platform because some people don't want to buy into Microsoft's ecosystem and trying to argue that you should just use Github purely because it's more popular and more profitable, with the obligatory ugly AI-generated image at the top.
- imp0cat 2y ago
  There is no point. It's a fluff piece, a thinly veiled atempt at getting their product to the HN front page.
Tepix 2y ago
Gitlab is pretty good, it's decentralized and it's open source. Frankly we should see less centralization at GitHub and more gitlab instances. In particular after the US election - Github is owned by Microsoft and they love training their AI on your code (which i don't mind for open source projects).
- killingtime74 2y ago
  I don't think anyone argues that it is bad, Just that it's expensive to run when taking into account engineer-hours
- arcanemachiner 2y ago
  I don't understand how the election is relevant to the topic.
  - Tepix 2y ago
    Here are some keywords for you: Digital souvereignty. US cloud act. Industrial espionage.
yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
I don't follow. You won't support gitlab, because people who use it won't spend money, instead preferring to support github, which is cheaper than gitlab across the board?
- exac 2y ago
  He is talking about people self-hosting GitLab (so they aren't paying monthly fees to GitLab), and comparing the Engineering hours + server uptime costs + related costs to just paying for GitHub (which is cheaper).
  - yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
    I assume he's talking about people self-hosting gitlab CE since the paid versions cost the same regardless. But if that's the comparison, then I would expect to compare to folks who exclusively use github's free offering.
    - wink 2y ago
      No, because hardly any companies would use github free, so I think the comparison isn't too bad. The "no costs" is a wild argument to me though, because I've seen "we want it locally available" and "we can't put code in the cloud/"laws"" etc, but never "this is cheaper than a couple bucks per month"
- elaus 2y ago
  Yes, it's a strange argument in my opinion. He also argues that almost all open source projects live on Github, but those don't pay money for dev products either.
simonw 2y ago
"If we compare GitHub’s $2 billion revenue to GitLab’s $579 million revenue for 2024, this is a 1:4 ratio, which is already pretty huge." I think GitLab having a quarter of the revenue of GitHub is incredibly impressive, and makes me take GitLab a whole lot more seriously.
- killingtime74 2y ago
  Do they have 1:4 ratio of expenses though
  - TechDebtDevin 2y ago
    Its probably more like 1:2 or 1:3. GitLab has 2,300 employees, and is fully remote. They also take advantage of an international labor force being fully remote [0]. Github probably benefits from Microsoft's real estate portfolio, but they do have offices, they have almost 6k employees and probably a lot more corporate bureaucracy[1] [0]:https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ [1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
    - freefaler 2y ago
      Revenues per empoyee: - Github: 2 bil. revenue on 6K employees = 333K/employee - Gitlab: 547 mil. revenue on 2300 employees = 237K/employee revenue interesting, github is more efficient on that metric ... scale matters I susppose
- rob74 2y ago
  BTW, 2/0.579 = 3.45, so if you are going to do any rounding, you should round down to 3, not up to 4 :)
- a2800276 2y ago
  Especially after they were ragging on french developers for "not understanding ROI". And the final paragraph is the kicker: "I’ve nothing against GitLab, and their software might be pretty good. All we know is that they’re outsiders, while a lot of the tech market in Europe seems to think that betting on GitLab is the best go-to-market strategy." Sounds like they haven't even evaluated gitlab? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. At least I've heard of Gitlab! If your advice is not to cooperate with outsiders or to even evaluate their offering, well... The French have amazing marketers, but they suck at writing coherent blog posts ;)
deng 2y ago
Yes, I agree it's probably the right choice for them. Companies using the GitLab CE would probably never buy Mergify anyway, not only because they don't want to spend money, but also: if they can live with the bare-bones GitLab CE, I can't imagine why they would have the need for Mergify. Regarding market share of GitLab, I would also assume that it's not looking good, but I only have anecdotal evidence. At least we (350 premium seat license) are definitely looking to migrate away from GitLab, for various reasons, but mostly cost. It seems the Premium tier has become the ugly step child of GitLab, but Ultimate is simply way too big a step cost-wise. Also, the new AI features have a hefty additional cost, and at least for coding, Copilot is superior in my experience. Combined with the overall bugginess of GitLab and missing essential features like proper code search (yes, I know, they will ship with Zoekt any day now), it's in a bad spot now compared to GitHub. EDIT: I forgot one very important additional thing: GitLab was attractive in the EU for regulatory reasons, as GitHub was US hosting only. But since end of October, GitHub has EU hosting generally available: https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-github-enterprise-cloud-data-residency-in-the-eu-is-generally-available/ https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-github-enterprise-c...
- spockz 2y ago
  AFAICT it doesn’t matter where things are hosted, the US still reserves the right to access the data because if the company or the parent company are based in or want to deal with the US. Or has this changed somewhere in the last 4 years since I looked at it?
  - deng 2y ago
    That might very well be, but what are you gonna do? Forbid using Microsoft cloud services completely? As we say in Germany: that train has already left the station...
    - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
      With Trump in power, the train is running in reverse at full speed )
    - 2y ago
Barrin92 2y ago
The argument seems bad for the reason that if you take it to the limit it's self defeating. Moving to GitHub because it's cheap right now and is popular at some point results in even more GitHub dominance which then translates into higher costs as they have market power. Running your own Gitlab instance or your own instance of anything really is by definition more upfront expensive but also a hedge against future costs. Cloud deployment is one example of it. There's been a pretty significant move back to on premise because that's the exact dynamic that played out. If there's a French cultural element to it it's not "people in France can't calculate costs", which is both patronizing and obviously stupid, it's that the French have a healthy skepticism of outsourcing their infrastructure to people whose decisions they have no control over.
skadge 2y ago
We are a ~70 engineers company in Spain, using on-prem Gitlab. One engineer in fully dedicated to the dev + maintenance of our CI/CD pipeline. Due to a large & spread code base (~1000 repos) and rather complex testing and deployment needs (we sell research robots: many different platforms, each of them with customer customizations), Gitlab has been an excellent platform for us, that we can easily shape to the needs of our pipeline. The dev experience is also great: pushing one tag essentially turns code in ready-to-install Debian packages in a test environment, followed by one additional click on a Gitlab pipeline to send the packages to production. We could probably do that with github as well, but I would not underestimate the convenience of having the whole platform accessible and available at our fingertips. TL;DR: we won't move to github any time soon :-)
- forty 2y ago
  Our engineering team is based in Europe (mostly Paris). We do use self hosted Gitlab but we pay the Gitlab Ultimate license. I think Gitlab is indeed quite popular here, and smaller companies do use the CE edition until they feel they can afford the paid version. Not implementing everything customers ask and focusing on supporting only one platform/forge and do it very well is very respectable, but I don't feel the explanation given by the author of the article is very convincing.
imp0cat 2y ago
What exactly would Mergify bring to someone using a Gitlab instance? This is the first time I hear about the tool. I scanned their homepage briefly and it seems that Gitlab already does most of the stuff they mention, including the AI stuff that's so popular right now. "CI Issues revolutionizes the way teams handle CI problems by leveraging the power of AI to automatically detect and surface issues." Yeah, ever heard of the /summarize command? So in conclusion, it seems to me that if people want to pay for something to improve their Gitlab experience, the money would be better spent on a Gitlab licence to unlock additional features.
Snetry 2y ago
Why do authors feel the need to include AI generated images like this? Are they even real people?
exac 2y ago
I really didn't realize that it has 25% the revenue of GitHub. Ironically, GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page. Perhaps they don't have many users that use GitHub to sign in, or perhaps the sign in page isn't tested? Whatever the case, the first button I press on their website being broken is exactly the same feeling I remember when I tried GitLab for the first time about 8 years ago.
- 28304283409234 2y ago
  > GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page I think you are mixing up Gitlab and Github?
  - frizlab 2y ago
    You can Auth on gitlab using github…
28304283409234 2y ago
I would rather have competition in this space. Especially if I were offering the product Mergify is offering. I'd be shitting my pants that the functions that my product offers will soon be added to Github natively.
tkfu 2y ago
> Ten years ago, GitHub was behind on certain topics (hello CI), but they are now way ahead of the competition. This is an absolutely wild statement to me. I find github actions to be really terrible for any reasonably complex CI flows; gitlab's CI is the primary reason we use it instead of github. If github's CI was worth a damn we'd certainly be there; as it is we mirror a bunch of repos to github just for discoverability.
- seo-speedwagon 2y ago
  Same. GitLab CI isn’t perfect, but it is quite excellent and GitHub seems very rudimentary in comparison. At my job we’ve been using GitLab CI for a few years now. We did an analysis of what it would take to move to GitHub and the answer was on the order of hundreds / thousands of person-hours and there are some things we just couldn’t port, period.
- ryandvm 2y ago
  Agreed. Github Actions are the wonkiest, Rube Goldberg shit I have ever worked with.
- ghusto 2y ago
  Have you tried it in the last year? It’s far ahead of anything else on offer, including products that do just CI. It’s like they’ve been laying low and learning from everyone else’s mistakes, and then boom.
sofixa 2y ago
Weird article. In any case, GitLab still has some advantages over GitHub. DX, UI and UX of GitLab CI is better than GitHub Actions. And one massive one - you can actually have a complex organisational structure without weird ramifications. In GitHub you have orgs and projects; in GitLab you have orgs, namespaces (which can be nested!!) and projects, and you can move projects around with automatic redirects. That means that you can actually group projects together, have them share CI configs, secrets, etc. In GitHub if you want to separate or group stuff, you have to create extra orgs, which results in extra SSO and token configurations. Yeah, GitLab Community self-hosted is pretty popular in France and more widely in Europe. That's because it's good and does its job, and it's actually quite easy to maintain, and it's entirely in your own control (how often are GitHub down? Did they train their LLM on your code? Are you beholden to US foreign policy and sanctions?). Having been responsible for running GitLab for a small to medium sized org with very heavy usage for a few years, I'm extremely convinced we got better ROI and uptime than paying GitHub. French engineers might go a bit too far on the DIY with free software route, but on the other end American engineers go way too far with "let's just buy another SaaS for this small thing" IMO.
grujicd 2y ago
I see a lot of people here misunderstood the article. It's not an attack on Gitlab in any way. Or taking the side for Github or Microsoft. It talks about business decision, not ideological one. If anything, it's attack on French bureaucratic processes that make it hard for employees to ask for something to be purchased. Or it's a cultural thing, once you're employed you're a fixed cost and your hourly rate is not analyzed anymore in purchasing decisions. The results are the same. It's easier to spend 10 hours on a free thing than to get approved a purchase for something that costs one hour. Numbers are just an example, don't know how they hit this specific case. Therefore, when considering market for your software, it's not only about demand and usage, you have to take into account whether that demand comes from those who are willing to spend money. The fact that 50% of developers in France use Gitlab, doesn't mean much if they're not willing to pay. If above the average (compared to other countries) 50% of usage is specifically because of the free self-hosting option, it preselects those who will spend time instead of money. Anecdotally, sales of my software in France, or for that matter in Spain or Italy, are 10x smaller than sales in Netherlands, or Sweden, much smaller countries. maybe it's a language thing, as some countries are know for excellent levels of English, and some not? But since my software is for developers and IT people English shouldn't be a barrier for them, so I suspect cultural and bureaucratic reasons are the main culprit.
sunshine-o 2y ago
Github pretends to celebrate open source but actually is not open source (Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially). Github is owned by a company with, some might say, in the long run a terrible track record. Github is starting to get slow and heavy. By the way, congrats to GitLab for its $579 million revenue and kind of staying in the race. It is not easy to compete with the borg hivemind nowadays...
- ffsm8 2y ago
  > Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially Fwiw: Gogs, the project gitea forked from is still being maintained and continues to be just plain open source. It doesn't have full vertical integration though (built-in ci etc) https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs
  - sunshine-o 2y ago
    Gogs is fantastic. A single binary, easy to setup, blazing fast. I also love it looks and feels like the old Github.
ktosobcy 2y ago
Author misses the point of self-hosted GitLab and conflates for some bizarre reason "self-hosted" as "free"... no, you still have to pay for it but it's not beloved VC "saas" model. And in Europe topic of data governance is very much a thing...
pauldhaliwalcc 2y ago
Someone who doesn't want to spend, is calling others who don't want to spend cheap. Classic. GitHub is cool, no hate there. I have ran a custom software development company.. so I was expected to send my customers who don't know how to use Github, to Github? We used Gitlab and it is much easier for us to support our customers. We use it heavily at CodeConductor.AI also. We will support GitHub, BitBucket and anything that speaks git. Github market is big enough, and they pay. You are fine. No hate on Gitlab though, bro.

38 points by physicsguy 2y ago

I don’t know, I’ve worked in companies using GitHub having to halt everything twice per month due to GitHub outage,and some other Doing pretty well with self hosted GitLab inside a vpn, factor the cost of having the devs stopping twice a month in the cost of GitHub.

szajbus 2y ago
That's anectdotal. I'd argue that the risk of your own instance being inaccessible for whatever reason is significantly higher than GitHub or GitLab having a full outage.

f1shy 2y ago

Excellent read of how things go in the EU about SW. Some places are different, in Germany the LOVE to put price to the hour, but still don't see that technical debt will have interest to be pay at the end.

whilenot-dev 2y ago
It's not about pricing at all, GitHub is way more attractive with just 4$/user/month. I think the predominant factor is data governance and information privacy. A self-hosted GitLab instance is mostly good enough, until you don't want to self-host it anymore and change to a cloud hosting service of your choice. It's just that not a lot of privacy aware people want to pay Microsoft for playing around with their data.
- rawfan 2y ago
  Price is not everything. My company has Gitlab licenses as a part of a larger Microsoft enterprise agreement/partnership but we still pay for GitLab Ultimate and use that as a default for all developers.
- pjerem 2y ago
  SE in France, 10y+ experience. I’ve never seen a company choosing those tools with any consideration for privacy or security or for any given reason. In all of the companies I worked, the "basic" tools (aka mostly GitHub, Google Workspace, Jira, Slack etc …) were all just default choices from the era when the company was fund and then those things just became the base bricks of thousands of internal procedures and scripts and once the company is at cruise speed, nobody will want to change any of those tools even if "better" (for whatever definition) or cheaper tools exists. Because it’s just too hard. And somehow, by some amazing magic I don’t understand, at some point, people are happy with the fragile stack of hacked things running on top of 4 or 5 extremely "shitty" (for whatever definition) products that you can’t cancel.
  - whilenot-dev 2y ago
    SE in Austria and Switzerland, 10y+ experience. I won't disagree with your assessment that the tech stack changes rarely or ever, but newly founded companies are still picking GitLab fairly often. AFAICS every business wants their tech stack "moved to the cloud", but infra people weight the costs and still have good contacts to local data centers from the pre-cloud-era - you know, contacts with a phone numbers and human support. Those data centers made it a business to run GitLab instances for you, among other things. A lot of businesses choose a discounter like Hetzner first and then move to one of those when support matters. That is mostly the best overall price (direct and indicrect costs) for the offered value, data governance included.

Kelteseth 2y ago

The weirdest thing is when I search for GitLab integration or bots, but I _always_ see them hosted on Github. Maybe this is just because GitLab has still god awful Google indexing.

not_your_vase 2y ago

So you evidently see a demand for Gitlab support (you can barely reject the requests at the same rate they come), at the same time you claim that there is simply no market for it?

Jweb_Guru 2y ago
Yeah, this is a very strange article that completely contradicts its headline.
- lnxg33k1 2y ago
  I start to recognise idiots when they start talking about absolute stuff, like "freedom of speech means you can say everything" or "developers don't know anything about X" this confirms my rule
davedx 2y ago
I think the argument is supposed to be about ROI but it didn't really drive the point home: They don't want to invest in integrating their product in Gitlab, because it's 1/4 the size of Github and they see trends pointing to a Github resurgence. If you have limited resources to build integrations then sure, I guess?
bakugo 2y ago
Seems like a classic case of someone making a decision based purely on personal opinion (I don't want to support Gitlab because I don't like it) and then working backwards in an attempt to find arguments to support that decision (and really struggling in this case, "50% of the developers I spoke to used Gitlab, but Github's profits are higher so clearly Gitlab is irrelevant" is particularly egregious)
ho_schi 2y ago
Sounds to me like We don’t support Linux because the low marketshare on sales. Because you don’t provide a native port, support and don’t even sale? Which is why your own special MBA market sales don’t change. And that why a lot of people suffer from bad software - it was the first known and they don’t think in long term. PS: GitHub is usually not an option for closed-source software. Not because of the uncertain development of the fees. Microsoft’s security track - especially for the cloud - is bad. And if you lock yourself to cloud services you end up in vendor lock-in. And that’s also open-source projects tend to Gitlab and others. As usual, GitHub was the first big player.

vbezhenar 2y ago

Same in my work. We would happily spend weeks settings things up and then hours maintaining it over months, without proper backups and with abysmal security, just to save few hundreds of bucks. I never understood that attitude, but I'm not the one who makes financial decision and tinkering with stuff is somewhat fun for me, so I don't really complain.

HideousKojima 2y ago
Even then, GitLab is super heavyweight compared to just running Gitea. Gitea is a million times easier to set up.
- arcanemachiner 2y ago
  Chiming in to request HN's current take on Gitea vs. Forgejo.
  - agile-gift0262 2y ago
    I think they are both great choices and it's a matter of personal preference. Do you distrust the new for-profit company that owns Gitea? Do you believe that all software should be libre? Choose Forgejo. Do you believe having a for-profit company behind gives the project more budget for feature development? Do you think that using a GPLv3 licensed software is problematic in legal terms? Choose Gitea.
- p4bl0 2y ago
  Does Gitea offer features like continuous integration, pages, user permission management, etc?
  - duskwuff 2y ago
    > continuous integration Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/overview > pages No, but if you have some sort of static content hosting set up (like a S3 bucket), it shouldn't be difficult to set up publishing to that with actions. It's also got project wikis built in. > user permission management Yes: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/permissions https://docs.gitea.com/usage/permissions

tayo42 2y ago

Poor gitlab marketing team having to deal with an blog post like this on the front page of this site lol Side comment to the screenshotted tweet. You can like open source with out making commits. It's nice to just be able to read the code or take something and just run it or fork it privately

bakugo 2y ago

Don't really see what point is being made here. No real criticisms of Gitlab itself, just someone being weirdly upset about being asked to support more than 1 git hosting platform because some people don't want to buy into Microsoft's ecosystem and trying to argue that you should just use Github purely because it's more popular and more profitable, with the obligatory ugly AI-generated image at the top.

imp0cat 2y ago
There is no point. It's a fluff piece, a thinly veiled atempt at getting their product to the HN front page.

Tepix 2y ago

Gitlab is pretty good, it's decentralized and it's open source. Frankly we should see less centralization at GitHub and more gitlab instances. In particular after the US election - Github is owned by Microsoft and they love training their AI on your code (which i don't mind for open source projects).

killingtime74 2y ago
I don't think anyone argues that it is bad, Just that it's expensive to run when taking into account engineer-hours
arcanemachiner 2y ago
I don't understand how the election is relevant to the topic.
- Tepix 2y ago
  Here are some keywords for you: Digital souvereignty. US cloud act. Industrial espionage.

yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago

I don't follow. You won't support gitlab, because people who use it won't spend money, instead preferring to support github, which is cheaper than gitlab across the board?

exac 2y ago
He is talking about people self-hosting GitLab (so they aren't paying monthly fees to GitLab), and comparing the Engineering hours + server uptime costs + related costs to just paying for GitHub (which is cheaper).
- yjftsjthsd-h 2y ago
  I assume he's talking about people self-hosting gitlab CE since the paid versions cost the same regardless. But if that's the comparison, then I would expect to compare to folks who exclusively use github's free offering.
  - wink 2y ago
    No, because hardly any companies would use github free, so I think the comparison isn't too bad. The "no costs" is a wild argument to me though, because I've seen "we want it locally available" and "we can't put code in the cloud/"laws"" etc, but never "this is cheaper than a couple bucks per month"
elaus 2y ago
Yes, it's a strange argument in my opinion. He also argues that almost all open source projects live on Github, but those don't pay money for dev products either.

simonw 2y ago

"If we compare GitHub’s $2 billion revenue to GitLab’s $579 million revenue for 2024, this is a 1:4 ratio, which is already pretty huge." I think GitLab having a quarter of the revenue of GitHub is incredibly impressive, and makes me take GitLab a whole lot more seriously.

killingtime74 2y ago
Do they have 1:4 ratio of expenses though
- TechDebtDevin 2y ago
  Its probably more like 1:2 or 1:3. GitLab has 2,300 employees, and is fully remote. They also take advantage of an international labor force being fully remote [0]. Github probably benefits from Microsoft's real estate portfolio, but they do have offices, they have almost 6k employees and probably a lot more corporate bureaucracy[1] [0]:https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/ [1]:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub
  - freefaler 2y ago
    Revenues per empoyee: - Github: 2 bil. revenue on 6K employees = 333K/employee - Gitlab: 547 mil. revenue on 2300 employees = 237K/employee revenue interesting, github is more efficient on that metric ... scale matters I susppose
rob74 2y ago
BTW, 2/0.579 = 3.45, so if you are going to do any rounding, you should round down to 3, not up to 4 :)
a2800276 2y ago
Especially after they were ragging on french developers for "not understanding ROI". And the final paragraph is the kicker: "I’ve nothing against GitLab, and their software might be pretty good. All we know is that they’re outsiders, while a lot of the tech market in Europe seems to think that betting on GitLab is the best go-to-market strategy." Sounds like they haven't even evaluated gitlab? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. At least I've heard of Gitlab! If your advice is not to cooperate with outsiders or to even evaluate their offering, well... The French have amazing marketers, but they suck at writing coherent blog posts ;)

deng 2y ago

Yes, I agree it's probably the right choice for them. Companies using the GitLab CE would probably never buy Mergify anyway, not only because they don't want to spend money, but also: if they can live with the bare-bones GitLab CE, I can't imagine why they would have the need for Mergify. Regarding market share of GitLab, I would also assume that it's not looking good, but I only have anecdotal evidence. At least we (350 premium seat license) are definitely looking to migrate away from GitLab, for various reasons, but mostly cost. It seems the Premium tier has become the ugly step child of GitLab, but Ultimate is simply way too big a step cost-wise. Also, the new AI features have a hefty additional cost, and at least for coding, Copilot is superior in my experience. Combined with the overall bugginess of GitLab and missing essential features like proper code search (yes, I know, they will ship with Zoekt any day now), it's in a bad spot now compared to GitHub. EDIT: I forgot one very important additional thing: GitLab was attractive in the EU for regulatory reasons, as GitHub was US hosting only. But since end of October, GitHub has EU hosting generally available: https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-github-enterprise-cloud-data-residency-in-the-eu-is-generally-available/ https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-github-enterprise-c...

spockz 2y ago
AFAICT it doesn’t matter where things are hosted, the US still reserves the right to access the data because if the company or the parent company are based in or want to deal with the US. Or has this changed somewhere in the last 4 years since I looked at it?
- deng 2y ago
  That might very well be, but what are you gonna do? Forbid using Microsoft cloud services completely? As we say in Germany: that train has already left the station...
  - sam_lowry_ 2y ago
    With Trump in power, the train is running in reverse at full speed )
  - 2y ago

Barrin92 2y ago

The argument seems bad for the reason that if you take it to the limit it's self defeating. Moving to GitHub because it's cheap right now and is popular at some point results in even more GitHub dominance which then translates into higher costs as they have market power. Running your own Gitlab instance or your own instance of anything really is by definition more upfront expensive but also a hedge against future costs. Cloud deployment is one example of it. There's been a pretty significant move back to on premise because that's the exact dynamic that played out. If there's a French cultural element to it it's not "people in France can't calculate costs", which is both patronizing and obviously stupid, it's that the French have a healthy skepticism of outsourcing their infrastructure to people whose decisions they have no control over.

skadge 2y ago

We are a ~70 engineers company in Spain, using on-prem Gitlab. One engineer in fully dedicated to the dev + maintenance of our CI/CD pipeline. Due to a large & spread code base (~1000 repos) and rather complex testing and deployment needs (we sell research robots: many different platforms, each of them with customer customizations), Gitlab has been an excellent platform for us, that we can easily shape to the needs of our pipeline. The dev experience is also great: pushing one tag essentially turns code in ready-to-install Debian packages in a test environment, followed by one additional click on a Gitlab pipeline to send the packages to production. We could probably do that with github as well, but I would not underestimate the convenience of having the whole platform accessible and available at our fingertips. TL;DR: we won't move to github any time soon :-)

forty 2y ago
Our engineering team is based in Europe (mostly Paris). We do use self hosted Gitlab but we pay the Gitlab Ultimate license. I think Gitlab is indeed quite popular here, and smaller companies do use the CE edition until they feel they can afford the paid version. Not implementing everything customers ask and focusing on supporting only one platform/forge and do it very well is very respectable, but I don't feel the explanation given by the author of the article is very convincing.

imp0cat 2y ago

What exactly would Mergify bring to someone using a Gitlab instance? This is the first time I hear about the tool. I scanned their homepage briefly and it seems that Gitlab already does most of the stuff they mention, including the AI stuff that's so popular right now. "CI Issues revolutionizes the way teams handle CI problems by leveraging the power of AI to automatically detect and surface issues." Yeah, ever heard of the /summarize command? So in conclusion, it seems to me that if people want to pay for something to improve their Gitlab experience, the money would be better spent on a Gitlab licence to unlock additional features.

Snetry 2y ago

Why do authors feel the need to include AI generated images like this? Are they even real people?

exac 2y ago

I really didn't realize that it has 25% the revenue of GitHub. Ironically, GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page. Perhaps they don't have many users that use GitHub to sign in, or perhaps the sign in page isn't tested? Whatever the case, the first button I press on their website being broken is exactly the same feeling I remember when I tried GitLab for the first time about 8 years ago.

28304283409234 2y ago
> GitLab auth is currently broken. I try to sign in via GitHub and am served a 422 Auth Error page I think you are mixing up Gitlab and Github?
- frizlab 2y ago
  You can Auth on gitlab using github…

28304283409234 2y ago

I would rather have competition in this space. Especially if I were offering the product Mergify is offering. I'd be shitting my pants that the functions that my product offers will soon be added to Github natively.

tkfu 2y ago

> Ten years ago, GitHub was behind on certain topics (hello CI), but they are now way ahead of the competition. This is an absolutely wild statement to me. I find github actions to be really terrible for any reasonably complex CI flows; gitlab's CI is the primary reason we use it instead of github. If github's CI was worth a damn we'd certainly be there; as it is we mirror a bunch of repos to github just for discoverability.

seo-speedwagon 2y ago
Same. GitLab CI isn’t perfect, but it is quite excellent and GitHub seems very rudimentary in comparison. At my job we’ve been using GitLab CI for a few years now. We did an analysis of what it would take to move to GitHub and the answer was on the order of hundreds / thousands of person-hours and there are some things we just couldn’t port, period.
ryandvm 2y ago
Agreed. Github Actions are the wonkiest, Rube Goldberg shit I have ever worked with.
ghusto 2y ago
Have you tried it in the last year? It’s far ahead of anything else on offer, including products that do just CI. It’s like they’ve been laying low and learning from everyone else’s mistakes, and then boom.

sofixa 2y ago

Weird article. In any case, GitLab still has some advantages over GitHub. DX, UI and UX of GitLab CI is better than GitHub Actions. And one massive one - you can actually have a complex organisational structure without weird ramifications. In GitHub you have orgs and projects; in GitLab you have orgs, namespaces (which can be nested!!) and projects, and you can move projects around with automatic redirects. That means that you can actually group projects together, have them share CI configs, secrets, etc. In GitHub if you want to separate or group stuff, you have to create extra orgs, which results in extra SSO and token configurations. Yeah, GitLab Community self-hosted is pretty popular in France and more widely in Europe. That's because it's good and does its job, and it's actually quite easy to maintain, and it's entirely in your own control (how often are GitHub down? Did they train their LLM on your code? Are you beholden to US foreign policy and sanctions?). Having been responsible for running GitLab for a small to medium sized org with very heavy usage for a few years, I'm extremely convinced we got better ROI and uptime than paying GitHub. French engineers might go a bit too far on the DIY with free software route, but on the other end American engineers go way too far with "let's just buy another SaaS for this small thing" IMO.

grujicd 2y ago

I see a lot of people here misunderstood the article. It's not an attack on Gitlab in any way. Or taking the side for Github or Microsoft. It talks about business decision, not ideological one. If anything, it's attack on French bureaucratic processes that make it hard for employees to ask for something to be purchased. Or it's a cultural thing, once you're employed you're a fixed cost and your hourly rate is not analyzed anymore in purchasing decisions. The results are the same. It's easier to spend 10 hours on a free thing than to get approved a purchase for something that costs one hour. Numbers are just an example, don't know how they hit this specific case. Therefore, when considering market for your software, it's not only about demand and usage, you have to take into account whether that demand comes from those who are willing to spend money. The fact that 50% of developers in France use Gitlab, doesn't mean much if they're not willing to pay. If above the average (compared to other countries) 50% of usage is specifically because of the free self-hosting option, it preselects those who will spend time instead of money. Anecdotally, sales of my software in France, or for that matter in Spain or Italy, are 10x smaller than sales in Netherlands, or Sweden, much smaller countries. maybe it's a language thing, as some countries are know for excellent levels of English, and some not? But since my software is for developers and IT people English shouldn't be a barrier for them, so I suspect cultural and bureaucratic reasons are the main culprit.

sunshine-o 2y ago

Github pretends to celebrate open source but actually is not open source (Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially). Github is owned by a company with, some might say, in the long run a terrible track record. Github is starting to get slow and heavy. By the way, congrats to GitLab for its $579 million revenue and kind of staying in the race. It is not easy to compete with the borg hivemind nowadays...

ffsm8 2y ago
> Gitea or Gitlab are at least partially Fwiw: Gogs, the project gitea forked from is still being maintained and continues to be just plain open source. It doesn't have full vertical integration though (built-in ci etc) https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs
- sunshine-o 2y ago
  Gogs is fantastic. A single binary, easy to setup, blazing fast. I also love it looks and feels like the old Github.

ktosobcy 2y ago

Author misses the point of self-hosted GitLab and conflates for some bizarre reason "self-hosted" as "free"... no, you still have to pay for it but it's not beloved VC "saas" model. And in Europe topic of data governance is very much a thing...

pauldhaliwalcc 2y ago

Someone who doesn't want to spend, is calling others who don't want to spend cheap. Classic. GitHub is cool, no hate there. I have ran a custom software development company.. so I was expected to send my customers who don't know how to use Github, to Github? We used Gitlab and it is much easier for us to support our customers. We use it heavily at CodeConductor.AI also. We will support GitHub, BitBucket and anything that speaks git. Github market is big enough, and they pay. You are fine. No hate on Gitlab though, bro.