31–40 of 77 posts
Why do people contribute to Gitlab and help a for profit company for free? I'm curious about what motivates you such as improving a tool that you use everyday or code quality?
I feel bad for GitLab. It's better than GitHub in almost every way. And yet GitHub is more popular both in open-source and enterprise. And in enterprise we are usually left with unholy combination of GitHub and JIRA because GitHub project management is a joke and they haven't done anything useful in that space for years. But for some reason pushing for anything other than GitHub is always an uphill battle. And the we…
I am not a GitLab user, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but I've read more than a few comments here on HN that GitLab stability and performance is worse than GH. For a mission critical system like source control, stability and performance are more important than any other features.
Of any tech company, GitLab seems like the most ripe for a conversion to an ESOP, which is often accompanied by a liquidity event for early investors. GitLab seem to be already operating as an employee-centered business, so from the outside looking in, conversion to an ESOP might be quite compatible with their existing culture.
EDIT: When you convert to an ESOP, you often work with an investment bank (such as https://www.awcfund.com/). As I understand, the investment bank provides a loan to a new tax-exempt foundation, which uses the cash to buy the stock from early investors; this foundation then repays the investment bank from revenue. These sorts of investors specialize in ESOP deals and they see the foundation which owns them money as less risky investments since ESOPs can grow faster than similar public for-profit companies since: (a) they are employee owned, and (b) because of the ESOP's tax-exempt status.
Funnily enough paying their employees somewhat competitive market rate still isn’t on there.
If you mean we pay local rates please see https://about.gitlab.com/2019/02/28/why-we-pay-local-rates/
I imagine that the on-prem and public versions are completely different beasts to operate. It's quite the engineering feat that they reached the current scale with the same codebase! I believe maintaining one shared codebase will be expensive in the long run: locally you want simplicity, SaaS you want scalability, micro-services and all that.
This allows us to scale GitLab.com and with our Unix packages and Charts it is still easy to install.
> In CY2015 we became the most popular on-premises software development lifecycle solution [citation needed]
The linked strategy page says they are aiming for a liquidity event by 2020. Of any tech company, GitLab seems like the most ripe for a conversion to an ESOP, which is often accompanied by a liquidity event for early investors. GitLab seem to be already operating as an employee-centered business, so from the outside looking in, conversion to an ESOP might be quite compatible with their existing culture. EDIT: When yo…
I feel bad for GitLab. It's better than GitHub in almost every way. And yet GitHub is more popular both in open-source and enterprise. And in enterprise we are usually left with unholy combination of GitHub and JIRA because GitHub project management is a joke and they haven't done anything useful in that space for years. But for some reason pushing for anything other than GitHub is always an uphill battle. And the we…
Last time I tried switching to it it was slow as molasses on the command line. Easily several times slower than GitHub. So I went back to GitHub. I still have a GitLab account, but I only keep my dotfiles there. I keep hearing they've improved performance, and maybe they did, but that's also what I heard last time I tried it, so now I'm kind of reluctant to give it another try. Unlike before, now it doesn't just have…
No idea what gitlab.com is like, we picked gitlab because we could self-host.
> In CY2015 we became the most popular on-premises software development lifecycle solution [citation needed]
What other on premise lifecycle development solutions are there?