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Gitlab S-1

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Re: Gitlab S-1

#131
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being sarcastic or not? And what are the explanations you've heard?

Half sarcastic, half serious? I think the prevailing theory is that yes these companies are spending tons of money to get a little bit of money, but it's a one time per customer expense and that customer will still be there for many more quarters, paying monthly dues.

Sounds a lot like:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

And is illegal in some jurisdictions and frowned upon in others.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#132

I m in one of the companies they quoted as case study. The lies are so horrible I hesitate to do something: they fucked us completely replacing a wonderful github/teamcity combo, it crashes all the time, features are so amateurish (vs teamcity especially) that we're struggling just to do basic things. I dont know what to do, but public investors should stay away: the product is not ready for people to pay for it. It'…

Honestly sounds like an implementation issue. I've run multiple Gitlab instances and I've used some more, and "crashes all the time" isn't a thing that just happens. Most features work fine, core ones even more so, some of the newer ones are clearly not polished enough but mostly function.

It's literally years in front of the competition ( GitHub and BitBucket).

Re: Gitlab S-1

#133
post #99

Last valuation was $6 billion, they initially wanted to go public in November of 2020 but because of COVID they delayed it. Doesn't sound cheap to me for a company who isn't profitable yet... (Microsoft payed 7,5 billion for GitHub and I think we can all agree that GitLab isn't used as much so nearly the same valuations seems a bit high too me)

GitHub wasn't profitable either when MS aquired it. it was about the same ARR than gitlab is right now. Now if your talking about brand and positioning that's another matter.

What's your source for the ARR comparison, out of interest? I'm of a different impression, and believe GitHub's ARR was actually quite a bit higher than GitLab at the point Microsoft executed that deal.

Do you think the GitHub or GitLab brand is stronger, today?

Re: Gitlab S-1

#134
post #79

If you are looking for a self-hosted git system, I highly recommend Gitea. Very lightweight and an order of magnitude easier to install and maintain. I am super impressed.

Gitea has a ton of issues, sadly. We self-hosted an instance where we had a number of mirrors and whatnot to have redundant copies of third-party dependencies. The server would deadlock, mirror tasks would time out and then couldn't be restarted, etc. We filed an issue (or maybe two) and the developers were... eh. A bit rude, to be honest. Dismissive that it was really an issue, where restarting and deleting/re-confi…

Could you link the issues please? Planning to use Gitea with a lot of mirrored repos.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#135
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using ADO for the past year or two and I don't hate it. While it absolutely lacks features, and most ADO things have relatively tough to use UIs, it _is_ extremely fast compared to GitHub and has some amazing UI designs for a couple things (especially reviewing large PRs). Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon.

> Although from what I heard they're porting the good parts into GitHub and deprecating/putting into maintenance mode ADO soon. Hush hush! By now that’s pretty much an open secret covered by various NDAs :) What even the NDAs won’t tell you though is how much time ADO has before it’s fully “dead”. If Microsoft’s track-record is anything to go by, I would assume ADO customers will be “encouraged” to migrate 3-5 years…

I’m curious as to how the heck they’ll move the data over. ADO projects are made up of many git repos with a shared ticket setup and all of the links are configured that way. I have no idea where I’d even start with that.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#136
post #48

So GitLab is advertising that it's the one place to do the entire software development lifecycle. Are there any big shops that have converted to 100% (or almost 100%) GitLab? Out of the six big names they list on their website, the only one that they have a case study for is Thomson Reuters, and they used Jenkins for CI (and it's from 2017, so a lot of this other functionality wasn't built yet). It's just a somewhat…

Air Force Platform One uses it.

It's hyperbole to say you can use it for the entire lifecycle. That might work fine for one-product monorepo shops, but Gitlab still doesn't scale well right now. Aside from basic issues like the runners not working well, the binary artifact repositories are way behind what something like Artifactory or Nexus offers. It's extremely annoying not having group and server scoped registry tokens except for the container registries. It makes it more difficult than it should be to publish modular libraries to be used elsewhere in your organization by other products. It's effectively unusable if you're working behind an air gap and trying to mirror public registries. The only way I can think to do it is creating a dummy projects with every kind of package registry enabled and push all of them into that one repo, but that won't work for things like Maven that have a notion of namespacing.

It can't really replace something like Jira, either (and in Platform One's case, it doesn't). You can only create an issue in a repo, but there is plenty of work organizations do and want to track and organize that can't be directly tied to a code change, let alone a code change in only one repo. So where do you raise an issue to track work not related to writing code or related to writing code but across multiple repos? I've seen people create dummy repos that serve no purpose except being a central place to put issues, but that is just working around the limitations. It's fine as a bug tracker, but not a general purpose work tracker and project management solution.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#137
post #99

Last valuation was $6 billion, they initially wanted to go public in November of 2020 but because of COVID they delayed it. Doesn't sound cheap to me for a company who isn't profitable yet... (Microsoft payed 7,5 billion for GitHub and I think we can all agree that GitLab isn't used as much so nearly the same valuations seems a bit high too me)

Timing of the CFO joining is interesting to me. From the S-1, Brian Robins joined GitLab in October 2020, so the desire to go public may have been there but an IPO is an enormous amount of work and I can imagine goes much better with an experienced CFO at the helm who has done it before. Therefore, "because of COVID" sounds like a contributing factor certainly, but may not be the whole story.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#138
post #36

I realize plenty of tech companies IPO and aren’t profitable. But it seems scary to be losing more money than what you generated in total revenues. REVENUE: 2021: $152m (loss of $192m) 2020: $81m (loss of $130m) EDIT: reworded for clarity.

It requires closer inspection in this particular case, but losses are not always bad if they’re calculated. For example, if you spend $100 to bring in a customer that yields $200 in a year, it makes sense to “buy” as many customers as you can.

But is the company “default alive”, as I think Paul Graham calls it? That is, could they cut that spending tomorrow and actually have money coming in that more than covers the costs of keeping the lights on?

Re: Gitlab S-1

#139
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what a shame for GitLab's users Can you please elaborate about this?

In my opinion public exit has been twisted 180 degrees. The reason for a company going public is to raise capital that individuals do not have to expand the business - build new factories, hire or whatever. After all there is much more money distributed in the public than few individuals have and in exchange you get shares in the company. I don't think GitLab is in need of that, what a lot of companies are doing now…

I disagree with this characterisation.

Gitlab is losing money. They do need the capital.

While it's true sometimes shareholder interests can lead to the users getting screwed, that's a very short term and dangerous game to play. It's the equivalent of killing the Golden Goose. Companies that play that game may find themselves out of business in short order. They're opening opportunities for the competition.

Re: Gitlab S-1

#140
post #48

So GitLab is advertising that it's the one place to do the entire software development lifecycle. Are there any big shops that have converted to 100% (or almost 100%) GitLab? Out of the six big names they list on their website, the only one that they have a case study for is Thomson Reuters, and they used Jenkins for CI (and it's from 2017, so a lot of this other functionality wasn't built yet). It's just a somewhat…

Air Force Platform One uses it. It's hyperbole to say you can use it for the entire lifecycle. That might work fine for one-product monorepo shops, but Gitlab still doesn't scale well right now. Aside from basic issues like the runners not working well, the binary artifact repositories are way behind what something like Artifactory or Nexus offers. It's extremely annoying not having group and server scoped registry t…

Also, in Jenkins' defense, it's often nice to have a general purpose automation server. I never liked Jenkins, but I miss being able to create jobs that check the health of your deployments, report filesystem usage to user of your developer workstations, run very large-scale end to end integration tests independently from builds, update wikis and documentation automatically. There is plenty of automation that can happen outside of code CI that may not be related to code changes at all but is still useful.

Understanding of course Gitlab does have a notion of scheduled jobs that just run on a timer rather than being triggers by a changeset push, but that still isn't enough, and embedding shell scripts in yaml strings is a very poor substitute for Jenkins' Groovy DSL when there is any kind of complicated logic required by your jobs.

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