10 ms·
GitLab raises 1.5M
- jobvandervoort 11y agoWe're very excited with this opportunity. We'll be here if you have any questions.
- marcelo_lebre 11y agoNicely done!
- sytse 11y agoThanks Marcelo!
- marvel_boy 11y agoNice ! Without doubt GitLab has created a lot of innovation. What are the main new things you will be deliver in the future?
- jobvandervoort 11y agoI'm quite excited about the future of GitLab CI. We're working hard on it and with each release it's becoming easier to use and more powerful. GitLab is going very fast both in terms of customization/integration and in usability. We've always valued a solid product that doesn't hurt itself by adding too many new features or configurables, but lately we've been spending more and more time thinking about the feel and look of GitLab. Concretely it depends on what our customers and community request and contribute. Also have a look at our CHANGELOG for the upcoming release: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG#L3 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO...
- physcab 11y agoThis is a naive question, but what's the difference between GitLab and Github?
- kenrikm 11y agoGitlab runs on your server. They are very similar, though there are still plenty of features Github has that Gitlab does not.
- jobvandervoort 11y agoI think we're actually running ahead in some ways. What are things that GH has that you miss in GitLab? See also: https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/ https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/
- wldcordeiro 11y agoA nice notification panel like the one in github would be excellent. I really like Gitlab and have been using it for my projects but the lack of a notifications panel is annoying.
- sytse 11y agoGood point, we're thinking about this. Personally I would really like to see a list of items I've been mentioned in but where I have not responded in the issue or merge request. Is that also what you want or do you want to see all mentions regardless of having responded yourself.
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> Gitlab runs on your server. They also offer a hosted version too that's free depending on your usage.
- sytse 11y agoThanks for mentioning that, and actually, GitLab.com is free whatever your usage. The paid plan is to get email support, the free users have forum support. https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/
- 11y ago
- joshmn 11y agoPaging @sytse; "GitLab CEO here" coming soon... :) For those who don't get the joke, https://www.google.com/search?num=40&es_sm=119&q="GitLab+CEO+here"+site%3Anews.ycombinator.com https://www.google.com/search?num=40&es_sm=119&q="GitLab+CEO...
- jobvandervoort 11y agoGitLab PM here, see also https://twitter.com/gitlabceohere https://twitter.com/gitlabceohere (not started by us, but we have a suspicion who did)
- sytse 11y agoThanks for the page Josh :)
- xenoclast 11y agoAww, you ruined it. Now he's not going to do it in this thread. (Probably)
- the-dude 11y agoBut what is the valuation?
- sytse 11y agoSorry but that is not public. (BTW I think it is a valid question, no need to downvote)
- digitalboss 11y agoIt's a seed investment, they really don't need to offer a valuation at this time, especially to the public.
- sytse 11y agoThe seed investments have a cap, which is close to a valuation. But it is indeed common not to disclose it.
- jtwaleson 11y agoCongrats from another Dutch company that expanded to the US! We're using GitLab for all our internal source code at Mendix, and are extremely happy with it.
- sytse 11y agoGreat to hear that! Your success is a great inspiration to all Dutch startups.
- general_failure 11y agoA feature I miss in GitLab and Github is an issue tracker across multiple repos. For example, our project has 5-10 repos but they are all part of single release/milestone. Currently, we have to create milestones in each of the repos and assign issues to those milestones. It's really a hassle. We cross reference commits a lot in the issues and this is the reason why we don't create a "empty" repo simple for common issues. Unless there is some way to say something like "Fixes commonissuetracker#43". Thanks, a very happy gitlab user
- sytse 11y agoGlad to hear you're a very happy user! We do the same thing as you, create the same milestone in each of the repo's and then use the group milestone view to see an overview. It would be nice to have a create milestone at the group level that creates the milestone in all projects, would you be willing to contribute that? Mentioning issues or merge requests in other projects can be done with the cross project reference, found in the right hand side of every issue and merge request, for example gitlab/organization#260
- rcthompson 11y agoI think the real angle of this feature should be to abstract the concept of "project" so that it is no longer synonymous with "git repository". And the migration path is pretty straightforward: every repo becomes a project containing a single repo, and then users can merge existing projects to create multi-repo projects (at which point you'd probably have to re-number every issue, pull request, etc. to avoid collisions).
- sytse 11y agoWe looked into this but it creates a lot of complexity. The group milestone view solve the problem neatly.
- rcthompson 11y agoThat seems pretty reasonable, maybe even preferable. Having issues attached to specific repos but synchronized to cross-repo common milestones sounds like it would work well.
- neom 11y agoBig fans of GitLab over here at DigitalOcean! Good work and good luck!
- sytse 11y agoGood to hear that! Thanks for your early GitLab template, it greatly helped us.
- fibo 11y agoI don't like the idea of a free as in beer software. GitHub is Great but Gitlab seems like a cheap clone, so targeting People that want to pay less or nothing. I don't think it is ethic to clone ideas, to build a better world we nerd new ideas.
- ikawe 11y agoI think building up a libre platform, even if the basic patterns have been established, paves the way for innovation. Imagine if people could just "add features" to Github. To put it another way, GNU and Linux were just a "cheap clone" of UNIX, but became a great platform for innovation.
- mikekchar 11y agoOne interesting thing about GNU is that originally developers were encouraged to implement work a-like solutions, but with completely different internals. This resulted in a large number of improvements over the standard Unix tools (a great example being bison vs yacc). I'll probably get some push back from the BSD folks, but back in the old days it was pretty common to install GNU (without the kernel) on every new Unix box you got because the GNU utilities were considered to be better (possibly some of them have gotten a bit bloated... bash... ;-) ).
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI used GitLab at my last company. It was one of the earlier versions before they went to YCombinator. At the time I wasn't a fan; I ran into bugs and just had odd persistence issues. But I've got to say GitLab is just incredible to use now. It's really nice and I now use it over BitBucket for my private repositories. I still use GitHub for OpenSource (that's going to be a hard barrier to get through if they really want to) but I'm a big fan. So congrats on the round! This is technically the second seed round, right? Or does YCombinator not really count as a seed anymore?
- sytse 11y agoGreat to hear you experienced a great improvement in the reliability of GitLab! We agree that the network effect of open source hosted on GitHub will take a lot of time to overcome. But right now we're very much focussed on on-premises installations and hosting private repos for free with GitLab.com Most people don't regard the Y Combinator investment as a seed round. Also, the seed round can stretch out in time due to the SAFE agreements that are used (it is not a priced round).
- gitdude 11y agoI am part of the Bitbucket team. Would love to hear what made you switch from Bitbucket?
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoSo the price is one thing. Granted my personal projects are only just me but some of the projects I've collaborated on before involved multiple people so just for simplicity's sake I moved all of them over (I hate having multiple services for the same type of thing; GitHub is the only exception because their private pricing is really high and it's really difficult to do OpenSource anywhere else). I'm not going to lie and this is going to sound kinda shallow but I thought GitLab looked nicer too. Granted this wasn't the main thing that made me move but it did help nudge me a little. Beyond that it's not like git is very different between places so it's kinda hard to differentiate in my opinion.
- ptype 11y ago
- nodesocket 11y agoSeems like a small amount to raise from a heavyweight VC like Khosla and super angel Ashton Kutcher. I would imagine trying to compete against GitHub and GitHub enterprise would be a capital intensive thing.
- sytse 11y agoThanks for your remark. GitLab is a work of love for more than 800 contributors. That is why we've been able to bootstrap the company. Most of the time we're around cash flow breakeven. We plan to hire expensive sales and marketing people in SF so we need a bit of cash. But after 3-6 months they help to generate more revenue. This allows us to raise relatively little capital so we have more control of our destiny. We don't need to raise more than our competitors to win because of our open source model.
- schandur 11y agoCongratulations to the GitLab team! We use a self-hosted version and are very happy with it.
- sytse 11y agoThanks, glad to hear that!
- wldcordeiro 11y agoI've been using Gitlab now for a few months and really like it but I've run into some bugs on gitlab.com that I've reported through multiple avenues and have had zero success fixing. The main one is that there are some repos that if I make an issue or edit an issue on the server will 500 error on form submit (the submit will still occur, the redirect is broken.) It would be beyond nice to see this extra cash go to a more responsive support system.
- sytse 11y agoSorry for not following up soon enough, I see that https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/202 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support-forum/issues/202 was open for a long time. I'll try to get you an answer soon. We are indeed planning to hire more people for community support and are looking for a junior service engineer https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
- yAnonymous 11y agoCongrats and thanks for the great software!
- sytse 11y agoThanks and you're welcome!
- edwintorok 11y agoWhen I visit a project page I usually do it for one of these reason: * learn about what the project is, a short description on what it is, how to install, where to find more documentation * look at / search the files or clone the repo * search bugreports or create a new bugreport Your default project page looks quite similar to gitorious, which looks more like a place to just host your repository and not a place to interact with the project. Bitbucket's default looks way better for example, and github's is quite good too. My suggestion to make Gitlab fit better into my workflow: * default page/tab for project root should be configurable, either on per project or per user basis: I'd like to have the README as default for example, the Activity page by default interests me less. * there should be a tab for issues on the default page, its more important than to see the activity IMHO * you've got the clone URL in an easily accessible place, good! * the Files view is quite similar to Github's (good!), but I can't figure out how to search (either fulltext or filename) * I don't see a button to create a new issue (I'm not logged in, should I login first? Github has a new issue button that takes you to login) * how do I search in issues (fulltext?) * how do I search for project names, or inside projects/issues globally? * the default project page should somehow highlight or focus on making it easy and obvious the main aspects on how you'd interact with the project, if all features are shown in equal style it feels somewhat cluttered and overloaded. P.S.: should I open a feature request about these on the gitlab site?
- shampine 11y agoWhen you view a repo if you click the readme tab then come back later, the readme tab is the default. I'm not sure if this is stored short term or long-term but it was a featured added in the last 3-4 releases iirc.
- sytse 11y agoThanks for your feedback, nice of you to submit this. We've merged a completely new project homepage for 7.13 (out on the 22nd) that addresses some of the things you mentioned. It will not be configurable however. Create issue is indeed only visible when logged in, makes sense to always show it, feel free to submit to feedback.gitlab.com Searching is fulltext but can be improved.
- jbrooksuk 11y agoFirstly, a major congratulations to the gang at GitLab - well deserved! We'd used GitLab for over a year internally, but as I've mentioned previously, it became a pain to maintain. So we switched to GitHub for our private "important" projects and turned off our GitLab instance (other reasons caused this too mind). Our version was 6.7 or something up until today. Today we realised we should run GitLab internally again for non-critical repositories - since our networking is a pain to give external access to servers - we can't access it out of the office. I updated us to 7.12 CE and I kind of regret it. The UI is so complicated now. Whilst there are good features that we like, it's so hard to navigate to where you want to be. I think this is down to the "contextual" sidebar. I really do prefer GitHub's UI for repo administration and usage, which is a shame. Sure, the colours are nice in GitLab but it's far from functional. My colleagues felt the same way too. Also (for those at GitLab) your Markdown renderer is still not rendering Markdown correctly in all cases... Anyway, not to take away from the funding - it's excellent news!
- tomphoolery 11y agoIt's very, very difficult to do what GitHub did. They combined a great sense of UX design with an extremely powerful and necessary backend product, and they figured out a way to make money doing it. GitHub's large bank account and horde of developers allows it to quickly take charge of high-stakes situations and come out on top. (This, of course, is not implying that simply throwing money at the problem will solve it...look at Atlassian Stash, a great product but pales in comparison to GitHub) Open-source projects need money and time too, but most of us don't get paid to work on open-source software, so GitLab suffers from the fact that it's no one's job to create it. Now that GitLab is getting some funding, it will at least level the playing field somewhat.
- mindsocket 11y agoI'm a product manager for Stash. I'd love to know more about what you find lacking in Stash. We've got a bumper crop of improvements in the works that we think are useful, but the more feedback to guide us, the better.
- Vespasian 11y agoCongratulations on the funding! I am using a gitlab instance for about 2 years on my personal server and have been very happy with it. Recently, (finally!) we switched our research group over from (a very very old version of) redmine and you can't imagine my joy when that happended! I think never before in my life migrating wiki pages and issues felt so good. Last but not least it is encouraging to see a European software startup thriving and growing like you do. Nothing against the great products from SV but a little geographical competition never hurt nobody. Right? ;) Keep up the great work. Grüße aus Deutschland / Greetings from Germany
- sytse 11y agoThanks Vespasian, great to hear you're happy with GitLab.
- ausjke 11y agoFor some reason I feel Redmine + Gitolite is the best for everything, except for code-review that is.
- jobvandervoort 11y agoWhat do you miss in GitLab that RM and Gitolite offer?
- mullingitover 11y agoI'm a big fan of GitLab's ability to create custom hooks and protected branches. GitHub doesn't offer those things, and despite their more polished UI it was a dealbreaker.