Gitlab is reportedly up for sale

It's kind of a poisoned well situation. Whoever would purchase them would lead to the departure of many disgruntled users who basically were with Gitlab to stick it to Microsoft.

I've also never felt compelled to use Gitlab. They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.

If I started over, I'd go with Drew's Sourcehut hub for the sake of actually shooting for something different.

I don't really see who would pay $8B for this business which has no moat-future.

Every time GL is mentioned, I am reminded of the 2017 incident where a person 'rm -rf' the primary pg data logs. The reenactment by Kevin Fang is always a good source of comedy on a bad day.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tLdRBsuvVKc

It’s a shame they are selling out, but I suppose it was bound to happen sooner or later. GH is vacuuming up all of the market share.

I kind of liked the ability to self host my own GL. But for small/personal use cases. It was a bit overkill.

Why can so few medium sized software companies succeed in the long term anymore? Why does everything need to consolidate to just a few companies.

As a small startup I know I'm not really their core buyer, but I absolutely love Gitlab.

It's a bit worrying to think about the impact a purchase/merger might have on the product.

What the article doesn't make clear is how much of the company capital is public? If the founder owns 45% of voting shares and Google/Alphabet has 22%, are only 33% of the shares actually on the public markets?

Gitlabs increased revenues are only due to price hiking and removing of lower tiers.

For example my bill with no additional needed features has risen from 6€ per user per month or so to €29 in something like 2-3 years.

I’m sure any serious buyer would look through that and realise some major churn is about to happen as renewals hit. - especially as they will be wanting customer/rev growth.

Does Datadog have a good remote policy? Will be interesting to see if any acquirer keeps it long term.

edit: I guess they do https://careers.datadoghq.com/remote/

I've worked - like everyone else here, I believe - extensively with GitHub in the past, as it was the de facto standard 1 decade ago.

Then, about 5 years ago I started working in a company that went the GitLab way, specifically due to the CI/CD support they provided directly in the platform.

At first, I didn't like the change so much, but as the project kept going, and we invested more and more in CI/CD, I can't see any going back. There's just nothing in GitHub that would allow us this kind of control and flexibly and automation over the build/testing/release process.

I get it if for your own personal development you prefer GitHub (I still do), but for anything of a medium/big size that's willing to invest time and money into a fully automated release process, GitLab is the way. And I guess that's where the value of GitLab to investors lies, in its appeal to the enterprise sector.

I like GitLab's product but I don't like the developments they've made in the last few years. It seemed to me to have been captured by too many product managers trying to make a name for themselves and became less of a cohesive user interface/feature set. The cost kept going up as they hired more and more people.

Not a good development, some competition is always good in this space.

I think AWS should buy it. Given they just deprecated CodeCommit.

I wonder what it means to the government use of it. Every government entity I’ve seen thus far uses gitlab. And I’m guessing because self hosting critical.

I really hope they don't sell.

They really fucked up their pricing. There is such a steep cliff to climb these days. Literally starts at $30/user/month. You can almost get GitHub enterprise and Copilot for that price.

But their open core model, fully remote organizational structure, and overall product quality is highly valuable. How many open source distros self-host GitLab? Debian, Arch, Alpine, postmarketOS, any I'm missing? Then GNOME, KDE, and free desktop have their own instances. How many companies self-host or use gitlab.com? There is real value and momentum there. Would be a shame to succumb to impatience and AI frenzy. I doubt datadog can steward the project in the same way.

Self host Forgejo and truck on with all the same features in a tiny footprint.

Gitlab has always been massive bloat that takes way too many people to maintain, and way too many resources to deploy. Not to mention proprietary feature gating that is a major turn-off to community contributions.

Great, I just moved my items to gitlab.

I wonder how long the new owners will add AI, Copilot, 2FA and other crap to their site.

I went github -> back to RCS and anon ftp -> just now to gitlab

I guess it is back to RCS and anon ftp.

FWIW, I would expect IBM to grab gitlab if it is really up for sale.

Hopefully someone decent buys it and reshapes the direction without major layoffs.

I use GitHub because there is no compelling reason not to and that’s what we have at work. But GitHub is stagnating and I have the idea of them having even more market share. Their AI propaganda is also insane.

Is there any self-hostable software that supports both Git and SVN?

Companies are bought, not sold.

No IBM?

Anyone is contemplating this should sincerely reconsider.

Imagine Broadcom getting it :D

Many companies have no choice but to self-host to comply with export control regulations. We use GitLab and drool over GitHub the whole time. But this is one advantage for GitLab, fundamentally we won't use GitHub because we need to control the data ourselves. Think for example of the defence industry, it's a big deal.

At my last job, I joined right when the company switched from Github to Gitlab. That right there should've been a massive red flag