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Gitlab from YC to IPO

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#221

Post by bdcravens »

gbear605 wrote: post #149
bdcravens wrote: post #146

What has really bothered me about Gitlab is that everytime Github copies a feature, there's a testy blog post about "we did it first!" when Gitlab as a business is a copy of Github.

And Github is a copy of Sourceforge, which is inevitably a copy of someone else. Source code hosting as a business isn’t new, it just needs to be executed well.

Sure, though some of the ergonomics around git hosting are different from what was available on Sourceforge, especially looking at features like pull requests, which Gitlab cloned pretty much 1:1

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#222

Post by devoutsalsa »

__turbobrew__ wrote: post #182
devoutsalsa wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self hosting is never easy. If you nerf the GitLab database by doing something unsupported or because of a bug, good luck with that. Source: an employer of mine nerfed the GitLab database and support to fix it was not an option, so we had to migrate to their cloud offering.

The gitlab omnibus installation has built in support for backups. Literally just run a single command to create a backup on a network share. Not having backups for gitlab on prem is just lazy system administration.

It wasn't a problem of losing the DB. The database got corrupted some how. All of the backups eventually became corrupted. This prevented us from upgrading from some version to some other version.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#223

Post by Mikeb85 »

robinhood wrote: post #186
Mikeb85 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub is Microsoft now. Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage. Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of ne…

> What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust?

Stop doing shady shit. The whole .NET Foundation kerfuffle from last week... Or concerns about how Copilot trains its data...

I like some of the open source work they do. It's nice that they opensourced LSP and built VSCode. I like some of the language research they do (their contributions to Haskell, Pony and F* more or less originated there, plus their mainstream languages) but can't shake the feeling that they only embraced open-source to get developers back on their side after losing out on mobile and much of the initial cloud rush.

Anyhow, I use some of their stuff, but I only trust the licenses, not the company. Not huge on having them lock me into a platform.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#224

Post by drodio »

jedberg wrote: post #126
specialist wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?

I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potenti…

Honored to have you as an investor, jedberg!

And I’d modify one thing you said: I believe the #1 most important skill for a startup CEO to master is storytelling —- which is critical for selling, fundraising and recruiting. https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/the-1-must-m...

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#225

Post by mikepurvis »

outworlder wrote: post #167
mikepurvis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this. The quality of your Jenkins experience will be pretty much inversely proportional to how much groovy script is in your Jenkinsfiles. Every new permutation of parameters is a new chance for something to go wrong, and there's basically no sane way to unit test or validate any of your "helper" functions, so they're all write-once-change-never. Which is not necessarily a problem inherent in Jenkins— Je…

Groovy is arguably the wrong language choice, even if it worked fine in other aspects. The string handling situation alone is crazy, which is compounded if you are using it with bash (which has its own crazy ideas about string escaping). That's a not too uncommon scenario. You end up with this: https://gist.github.com/Faheetah/e11bd0315c34ed32e681616e412...

To be fair, basically everything that interops/embeds bash like this ends up in a similar place— you see the same double-escape ridiculousness in CMakelists files and Nix package definitions.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#227

Post by rock_hard »

upheaval7276 wrote: post #104
pankajdoharey wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

Gitlab always felt like a set of checkboxes to appease non-technical managers. In my experience, most features are half-baked. Even the code review/MR experience is frustrating compared to GitHub. The UX for security scans is _really_ rough.

Fully agree!

We tried it for a year and didn’t like it

GitHub has less features but the UX around PRs is 10x better IMO

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#228

Post by byethewater »

isthis129283 wrote: post #48
alangibson wrote: post #30

Have any of the finance minded HN commenters decided if the $10B valuation is justified? I'm usually pretty negative about high valuations, but given their enterprise penetration, this one seems almost reasonable.

First 6 months of this year Gitlab took in $108M in revenue, and had $177M in expenses. Would you pay $10B to own a company that loses $10M/month, with the hopes they will continue to increase revenue in the future and become profitable?

There’s a Forbes article on the GitLab valuation which could be interesting to this thread: https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2021/10/12/gi...

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#229

Post by Lorin »

nodesocket wrote: post #115
jedberg wrote: post #80

I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded. I honestly didn't think they stood a chance. I'm happy…

I’ll echo a sentiment I also had but perhaps I was wrong. I believed that users of GitLab used GitLab because they didn’t want to pay a premium (or pay at all) for GitHub; thus I viewed it as a cheaper alternative in the same vein as buying a Hyundai vs buying a Mercedes. I assumed only frugal “developers” were using it, and surely any legit companies would opt for the superior GitHub.

That'd be me, but I stuck around because issue management on GitLab is miles ahead of GitHub - however... if GitHub added scoped labeled I'd have a hard time convincing myself to stick around as the sheer number of users + discovery features blow GitLab out of the water.

Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO

#230

Post by harry8 »

atonse wrote: post #211
ekianjo wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.

Open sourcing .NET under an Apache license was a great move. And so was making it cross platform. I surely missed C# my first few years without it. Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.

How does that work with their patent threats? Eg against mono, gnome, tomtom(?) for using a Free implementation of the fat filesystem?

I haven't been following it but is all that renounced so it can't possibly come back or be applied to the next people?

My first reaction is "How do we know that releasing the code isn't just bait?"

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