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Choose GitLab for your next open source project

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Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#11

Post by sytse »

matheweis wrote: post #5
sytse wrote: post #2

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

Concerned about the long term implications of the high growth startup model... Gitlab is awesome and all that, but how can I be sure the free version will stay that way in the long run? Is the free (free as in beer, I'm not an open source zealot otherwise) Gitlab not just a part of the conversion funnel, eventually made unsustainable once growth plateaus?

Thanks for your question! We're a VC backed startup so we have to have a so called liquidity event at some point. As explained on https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ our goal is to IPO instead of being aquired. This will ensure we can preserve our culture, mission and goals.

There will always be an open source version of GitLab, more than 1000 people contributed and it the most popular self-hosted option, used on-premises by more than 100,000 organizations. They will keep going with the open source version, with our without GitLab Inc.

But the MySQL purchase by Sun and Oracle has shown what can happen to projects when the company is acquired. The best option we saw is to at least codify our promise to the rest of the community in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

When we break our promise it is time to fork.

Any suggestions are appreciated.

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#12

Post by hardwaresofton »

Despite setting up my own gitlab instance once, and trying to get the company I was working at onboard, I never knew that gitlab.com was a thing for hosting projects... is this recent?

Either way, just signed up. Excited to support Gitlab, any way I can.

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#13

Post by sytse »

dogweather wrote: post #9
sytse wrote: post #2

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

Thanks for jumping in to the thread. I'd really like GitLab to succeed simply because I like the results of healthy competition. So can I name a couple of things that are standing in its way? 1. gitlab.com site search is effectively down. A simple keyword search, e.g. for 'omniauth' takes 45 seconds: https://gitlab.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search=omniauth&gro... I periodically find other site links which are surpris…

1. Our Elastic Search import is scheduled to be complete on Thursday. This should be a dramatic improvement http://i.imgur.com/HRawCIC.png

2. GitLab is an OAuth 2.0 provider, for the docs see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/oauth_provider.html I see that there is https://github.com/linchus/omniauth-gitlab updated 5 months ago, did you try that one?

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#14

Post by sytse »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #12

Despite setting up my own gitlab instance once, and trying to get the company I was working at onboard, I never knew that gitlab.com was a thing for hosting projects... is this recent? Either way, just signed up. Excited to support Gitlab, any way I can.

Thanks for signing up! GitLab.com launched after a 'Show HN' in 2012 but recently it has been growing a lot faster, 6x project growth in 2015 https://about.gitlab.com/2016/02/11/gitlab-retrospective/

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#15

Post by sytse »

carussell wrote: post #6
sytse wrote: post #2

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

I'm patiently waiting for you all to decide to focus your main interest on making gitlab.com the best place to host open source projects, while the GitLab EE/on premise stuff turns into a quiet side gig that just happens to bring in some extra cash. Any chance of that happening soon? To rephrase: There are folks willing to give you cash right now to be the host for their projects. Would there be a way to convince you…

Thanks for your question! We are trying to make GitLab.com the best place to host open source projects, see https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/

We do not think that paying for hosting itself makes sense, see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...

Instead of giving cash to use I would encourage people to move their projects and contribute by adding the features they need or helping our people, see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#16

Post by DanielDent »

The free hosted Gitlab is great. I really appreciate having it around. And if you haven't looked at it recently, it's faster than it used to be.

Free unlimited private repos w/ 10GB storage per repo (including LFS!) is fantastic. A recent project I worked on involved integrating ~15 upstream modules into a build process. Having the ability to set up a git repo for each module instead of thinking 'maybe I can come up with some hack to do this with less repos' is huge.

Having Gitlab CI w/ the ability to use your own workers just by running a single docker command is the icing on the cake.

And the fact that the repos which need to stay on our own infrastructure can also use GitLab - with an open source option to boot - is what makes choosing GitLab a very easy decision.

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#17

Post by sytse »

dandelany wrote: post #8
sytse wrote: post #2

GitLab CEO here. Awesome to see this article! Ask me anything.

First off - you guys have a great thing going and I wish you all the luck. What's the current status of the GitLab.com infrastructure? Are you still on Azure, and if so, how has it been? Does it seem like things are humming along and stable now, or do you foresee some more growing pains before things are rock solid?

Thanks for asking. We're still on Azure but it seems that most of our initial problems are solved, our uptime has been acceptable. PostgreSQL and Redis are now highly available. Before we call things rock solid we still have to figure out how to cluster our storage https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#18

Post by sytse »

DanielDent wrote: post #16

The free hosted Gitlab is great. I really appreciate having it around. And if you haven't looked at it recently, it's faster than it used to be. Free unlimited private repos w/ 10GB storage per repo (including LFS!) is fantastic. A recent project I worked on involved integrating ~15 upstream modules into a build process. Having the ability to set up a git repo for each module instead of thinking 'maybe I can come up…

Awesome, glad to hear this. As you can see in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 GitLab.com issues became 3x faster this week and we're working on further improving speed.

Re: Choose GitLab for your next open source project

#20

Post by sytse »

benatkin wrote: post #10

GitLab EE's source code is also available, though not under an open source license. Most of the differences are things I'd like to eventually see in an open source project (maybe GitLab CE, maybe a plugin, maybe a fork). From my perspective the best thing would be for them to eventually open source some features I'd like to have in an open source project hosting service, once they've made more reasons for people to p…

Thanks for your perspective and naming the features you would like to see in GitLab CE. Can I ask what open source project you are considering to host on-premises with GitLab CE?

We do try to open source features that are requested by open source projects, such as the branded login page after a HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10931690

I agree that falsely accusing people of looking at the EE code would be very bad. So far we only once declined a contribution to CE by claiming it was EE code, in this case the code was verbatim, the diff showed a zero character difference. Future calls will be harder but we'll try to prevent false declines.

More about this our criteria to merge CE contributions if they are already in EE can be found in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

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