Live data from Hacker News

Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

about.gitlab.com

21–30 of 325 posts

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#21
The "crippled community edition vs paid enterprise edition" business model raises red flags. It's not that different from the free crippled demo version or outdated by 2+ major versions freeware model.

Who gets to decide that features are enterprise only ? How are these enterprise only features: "Hosting static pages straight from GitLab", "git-annex", "git hooks", etc. ?

Get a crippled version that doesn't fit the reasonable expectations or pay for enterprise edition coming with a big bag of features I have no use for just to get the missing features that I can have on github for free (And I'm not a big fan of github)?

As such gitlab community is not very useful to me and does not seem to have a future because its chosen business model goes against its usefulness to people.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#22
post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

Have you tried using BitBucket?

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#23

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…

We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that.

I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#24
post #9

With VideoLAN, we're not on github, but I believe we fit the 'large open source project' description. We host VLC, FFmpeg, x264 and quite a few related libraries. For VLC and all related VideoLAN projects, we're moving to our own instance of GitLab hosted on our infrastructure. And to be honest, it's quite good, but a few stuffs are ridiculously limited, to the point that some people in the community are resisting th…

> Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules").

Isn't this use-case covered by Gitlab's issue labels?

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#25
post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

Bitbucket allows only 5 contributors for free private repos. Gitlab allows unlimited. That is the major point of distinction, imo. Especially for medium sized projects.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#26
post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

I think they mean you can download the free community edition and host that. Why do you feel you need to pay for the EE version?

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#27
post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

GitLab Community Edition is fully open source and completely free: https://about.gitlab.com/features/#community

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#28

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…

We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that. I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)

A good friend of mine likes to run https://gogs.io/ .. I havent used it heavily but Ive been impressed so far.

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#29
post #22
post #20

> "Right now GitLab.com is really slow and frequently down. This is because of fast growth in 2015. We are working to improve it in the first quarter in 2016. For now please consider downloading GitLab and using it on-premise for a fast experience." Is this a joke? I mean for people looking for free private Git hosting, there is Bitbucket. This statement is like saying "free, but not really, really." The fact is if I…

Have you tried using BitBucket?

I have, were you just saying you think it's bad?

Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab

#30
post #9

With VideoLAN, we're not on github, but I believe we fit the 'large open source project' description. We host VLC, FFmpeg, x264 and quite a few related libraries. For VLC and all related VideoLAN projects, we're moving to our own instance of GitLab hosted on our infrastructure. And to be honest, it's quite good, but a few stuffs are ridiculously limited, to the point that some people in the community are resisting th…

> Especially, it seems to be impossible to add custom searchable fields (like "platforms", "priority" or "modules") which are very very useful to do queries. Also, there is no way to do custom queries and store them ("I want all the bugs for Windows, which are related to the interface modules"). Isn't this use-case covered by Gitlab's issue labels?

I don't think so. Labels are too limited.

We want for every bug, that a few custom fields are always defined, to do a partition of the bugs, and to be able to query on those. Moreover, to change the priority or the platform, it's quite complex to do and will break often. Many bugs won't have it filled, for example. Labels do not guarantee that consistency.

As you can see, it's already what people want in the github open letter.

Post reply on HN