There's a 'github down' post here every other day.
The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.
This is what happens, when decision makers are out of touch.
So many things they could be doing, to make people buy into their services. For example they could simply run campaigns about how they promise to never use customer and user repositories for AI training. Or they could show better uptime statistics. Their CI language is better than Github's too.
If anyone gave me a choice between Gitlab and Github, I would go with Gitlab. But if I had additionally the choice to use Codeberg, I would choose that.
Maybe they are just not looking to grow. If they made such a statement, that would actually be a pleasant surprise. No hunger for "infinite exponential growth", just to impress investors? Great! That's a fat plus in my book!
I was on gitlab up until nov last year. I don't really miss it; have yet to experience issues with github.
Gitlab pricing was bonkers. It always felt like their sales team were trying to play gotcha with us over the years with pricing schemes that would milk us for money.
> The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal
Their pitch is not to you, the dev. But, to the investor class. We are in this funny place in the market where you can make more money by catering to the investor class than to customers. In other words, an upside down world.
The big thing on their roadmap is rearchitecting for something that can handle the increased load, though. Like, they're clearly paranoid that if they don't move fast, they're going to be just as busted as Github.
TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.
I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.
GitLab isn't open-source. It's "open-core". Third parties hosting GitLab instances don't have access to the same range of features that GitLab-the-company does.
GitLab Community Edition (CE) is available freely under the MIT Expat license.
GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) includes extra features that are more useful for organizations with more than 100 users. To use EE and get official support please become a subscriber.
JiHu Edition (JH) tailored specifically for the Chinese market."
Personal opinion, but I think a great deal of the people who are presently overloading github with one person created vibe coded projects would be just fine with the "CE" feature set.
I just rolled out CE in our small org, it is a nice step up from Free GitHub, there are Wikis, and no uncertainty about the runners. Founders like it better because their IP is on their own servers now.
I find it a bit concerning that this piece focusses so much on customers and shareholders... I know I don't pay, but perhaps sometime I will, and I am learning GitLab and applying at large orgs as GitLab consultant. All because of CE... So I hope it will stay. It is a nice and very complete on-ramp to EE.
GitLab was never going to be the ones to take the mantle GitHub left on the ground. They’re a “clone” company and have very few original ideas of their own.
To be fair to GitHub, "GitHub" Actions is just Azure DevOps Pipelines wearing a mask. Which I think explains a lot about it's quality as a feature. It was brought in as a rushed copy-paste of the existing Azure DevOps feature very quickly post acquisition.
I have to regularly use Azure DevOps and the whole platform is painful, and now is rotting on the vine. I hear there is internal strife at Microsoft between Azure DevOps and GitHub products.
To build good software you need to take the time to make your existing features work well, and improve or prune the ones that don't. In other words, it is craftsmanship.
The American corporation and its values are anathema to craftsmanship. You can ******* a **** all you want, it's never going to turn into gold, but your hands will be covered in crud.
Yup. That was such an embarrassing incident and their postmortem of it was worse. They actually thought being transparent about how bad their engineering was would do them favours.
The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.
Nope, full throttle and stimulants, just because.