GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

Post by brianwawok » Fri, Jun 08, 2018, 5:43 PM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #150

brianwawok wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went Gitlab to Bitbucket + Jira. Quite a bit more power, for less money (even after paying for cloud testers).

Oddly enough we went exactly the other direction. Atlassian user tiers are huge (almost geometric in size) with the result that you end up paying for a ton of unnecessary head count. The CI obsoleting Bamboo and the collab tools obsoleting the dev features of Jira were icing on the cake. And a true up license model that doesn’t immediately bring all work to a screeching halt when you add one user too many to the app…

> And a true up license model that doesn’t immediately bring all work to a screeching halt when you add one user too many to the app access group in your directory was just the cherry on top.

Unfeature to me. If you add a new user 1 day before your yearly renewal, the "true up feature" means you pay an entire year's worth of usage for that 1 day. Other apps like LastPass pro-rate, and you would just pay a few cents to add a user for 1 day.

Post by ModernMech » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 4:51 PM UTC

mankash666 wrote: post #72

ModernMech wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can't compare them to companies whose mission is profit. Why not? They're a non-profit, sure, but that doesn't make them a charity. Like Redhat, they also don't have an obligation to give anything away for free. They just have an obligation to make sure at the end of the day, there's no money left over in the form of profit. And yet, they manage to not only generate revenue on an open source project, they make…

I don't see the logic here. Ghost's mission is to stay independent and afloat, and GitHub/Gitlab's to make the most money they can. These are indeed different and oftentimes opposing mission statements. The fact they all make software is co-incidental. My thesis stands - as a for-profit entity intent on maximizing profits and net-worth, empirically open source hasn't provided a vehicle to achieve those goals. At best…

> My thesis stands - as a for-profit entity intent..

No, you've changed your original position, which was "RedHat is the ONLY company managing a reasonable revenue stream while being fully open source." You capitalized "ONLY" to emphasize it. I challenged that statement, and you've conceded with this carve out: "At best, it allows a company to stay afloat, but it doesn't in any way guarantee maximizing net worth and profit of a company." which is a statement I agree with.

So while you say your original thesis stands, we've somehow arrived at a point where we both agree. Open source for a profit-seeking company hasn't delivered. But you can still make a company with open source -- it's just not going to be able to maximize revenue like a closed-source competitor could. But I think that goes to show people write code for more reasons than profit.

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source

Re: GitLab Isn’t Really Open-Source