Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by arihant » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:34 PM UTC

DouweM wrote: post #27

arihant wrote: 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

I said if I wanted hosted option, then their only reliable option is $390 onboarding. Which is true. If I must go on-prem, then I might just use git directly?

Meanwhile at Github, $7 gives me hosted private repos. It's free on Bitbucket if I limit collaborators.

The biggest selling point of these services is peace of mind and knowing someone is taking care of the code when I sleep. Otherwise, Git has always been a FOSS.

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

#62

Post by arihant » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:34 PM UTC

adam-a wrote: post #26

arihant wrote: 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?

If I have to host myself, why won't I simply host Git? The point of these services is peace of mind. If I'm managing on-prem, it kind of kills the point.

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

#63

Post by DouweM » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

drewcrawford wrote: post #59

DouweM wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? > I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. Fair eno…

> Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? 1. My hosting is way more reliable than yours :-) 2. I need to host the CI runners myself anyway, because you don't have the right config 3. I already have a private GitLab install, so it's no extra trouble 4. My repository mirroring is quite a lot better than yours, as it's instant, not hourly 5. I prefer to have a co…

> 1. My hosting is way more reliable than yours :-)

You've got me there :) I'm sure your aware of our intention to greatly improve GitLab.com reliability and performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues

> 4. My repository mirroring is quite a lot better than yours, as it's instant, not hourly

Heh, care to share? :) Maybe we can take some pointers from your implementation. How does your repository mirroring know that the upstream repo was updated? Do you use webhooks on GitHub? That would actually be pretty easy to implement, an `update_mirror` GitLab API endpoint that GitHub could call to, hmm...

> 5. I prefer to have a commercial relationship with important tools. You seem like nice people, let's see what happens when you get acquired.

What are you afraid of?

> As long as you can't be bothered to sell to 2-person teams, I'll just run CE and have my commercial relationship with AWS instead.

Fair enough!

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

#64

Post by skrebbel » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:38 PM UTC

DouweM wrote: post #46

drewcrawford wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday I ended up implementing my own mirroring of GitHub repositories. GitLab supports this in EE (new in 8.3), but not CE. That's not a feature that only large enterprises use–I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. To be clear, I don't think there is anything sinister about keeping features behind a paid firewall…

> I run an open source GitHub organization and wanted to use GitLab as CI. It works! But I needed to reimplement an EE feature to do it. Is there a reason why you didn't use GitLab.com, which runs EE and thus has Repository Mirroring? > I'm just saying that the EE features are not all "mostly interesting to companies with 100+ employees." Several of them are things I needed as a single open-source developer. Fair eno…

Honest question, did you ever consider making self-hosted GitLab EE free under a GPL-like license, but only for installations that only host open source and are reachable from the internet?

You might even get the community to develop EE features for you to sell :)

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

#65

Post by MoSal » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:39 PM UTC

Somebody just spammed their Issues page[1]. The one they link to in the letter.

I think the spammer is trying to make a point! For starters, there seems to be no rate limit applied.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues

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

#66

Post by talideon » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:40 PM UTC

dev360 wrote: post #28

Vespasian wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's a bit of a pity that they don't self host, even if they also have a Github repo.

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

#67

Post by imonabout » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:43 PM UTC

I don't think the fact that GitLab is free for basic users is very discoverable from the site. You've got the "features" tab, which leads to what seems to be the option of downloading a community edition, which makes it look like GitLab is only offering the code itself but not hosting from their, and the enterprise edition for some licensing fee (I suppose). Then you've got "sign in", but no "sign up", which leads me to ask "but then how do I sign up", which most naturally (for me) leads me to the "pricing" tab. Now this page only shows "trial" and the different priced tiers.

But if I press "sign in", I am able to sign up, with no notice about it being just a limited (45 day) trial. So so far I'm assuming that this is a perpetually free account, though I'm not completely sure yet...

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

#68

Post by Rafert » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:47 PM UTC

bigbugbag wrote: post #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 r…

git-annex is EE-only, but they're giving you git-lfs for free in CE. I expect the latter getting way more traction due to GitHub's backing.

Working with a on-premise GitLab CE has been just fine in a company with 20 developers, using Jenkins and later Go[1] for CI.

[1]: https://www.go.cd/

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

#69

Post by danielsamuels » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:49 PM UTC

Perhaps if they had the same uptime, page load speed and UX as Github, I would consider it. Unfortunately we tried it for a week at work and none of us could figure out our way around it (when it was working).

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

#70

Post by pmilot » Mon, Jan 18, 2016, 12:53 PM UTC

This attempt by the Gitlab folks to ride the Github dissatisfaction wave seems a little low-brow. Why respond to a letter that's not addressed to you? I would have preferred them to simply post an honest "Why you should migrate from Github to Gitlab" article. The tone just seems a little devious to me.

By the way, we're using self-hosted Gitlab at work and we love it. This isn't a knock against the actual product. In fact, I think Gitlab has improved tremendously in the last 18 months. I just wish they would be a little more up-front about their marketing efforts.