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 to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team on their successful exit!
Disagree. Github's self-hosted product is trash compared to Gitlab. Plus they were very late to the game when it came to stuff like CI, package management, project tracking and a whole suite of enterprise features. Github had (and still has) a huge lead in public open-source development, but that's it.
While yes, my first usage of Gitlab was an on-prem install, things really took off with Gitlab.com in ways I don't think anyone expected with healthy competition from Bitbucket and Github. I do think it was the unlimited free private repos with unlimited contributors that really skyrocketed the success of the Gitlab.com path.
Github is initially B2B SMB and B2C and Gitlab is B2B Enterprise. 10% of Github employee are sales , 25% for Gitlab. I would say they are not even competitors
We have been happy customers for many years. It has been a breeze to manage and upgrades, backups, and DR have been very good for us. For an on prem software of this complexity it is quite a feat. It has also always been at a very reasonable and affordable price point for enterprise-y on prem software. As an infosec consultancy that used it for projects and code we always appreciated being able to manage the security of our installation.
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 potential customers, etc.
If I'm not convinced to invest after one meeting, I usually don't invest. On the other hand, if I'm convinced after five minutes, I'm usually asking where to send the wire by the end of the meeting.
Armory is a good example of an open source/open core company I did invest in. They had me convinced in just a few minutes. They had an answer for every one of my objections and made me feel like I'd be missing out if I didn't invest. And so far they're doing really well and it's one of my best investments to date.
> ...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 potential customers, etc.
As cynical and hollow as it sounds, pretty sure this advice is consistent with what I have heard in multiple videos and blogs from YC.
Have an answer to every objection. First figure out all the ways you would object and make sure you have an answer, then note down any objections you don't have an answer to during your process and make sure you have a good answer next time.
And if you're selling a product, make sure you know your competitors well because a lot of objections will be in the form of "but competitor X does this, how do you solve that problem?" and "what do you do that X doesn't do?". So you better know X really well because the person you're talking to already does and will know if you're making stuff up.
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.
Just one user here, but I definitely prefer GitLab over GitHub.
Not because GitHub is bad in any particular way, I just like the feature set and UI of GitLab better. Less of a "Hyundai vs Mercedes" thing, and more of a "Ford vs Chevy" thing.
They're both decent and they both have approximately the same level of "premium-ness". They're just feature-wise and aesthetically slightly different in arbitrary ways. And some people either do or don't vibe better with the one or the other.
Interesting comparison with cars, I would think a Hyundai is much more reliable and less expensive to maintain than a Mercedes, and Hyundai is now being positioned as a more premium brand than it once was.
On topic, GitLab is great at CI/CD and awesome for self-hosting things.
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.
VCs are the most risk averse people you will meet. They pretty much only look for patterns. That's why it's so hard for minority/female founders -- because it doesn't fit their pattern. I actually invest mostly in minority/female founders for exactly this reason.
NOTE: I'm not associated with GitLab at all I just found the topic interesting. I don't know of many other projects that actually do things this way, with all the commercial licensed code mixed in with the open source code.
It is not. They're better than most – and I know that's not a high bar, but they clear it by a wide margin. Nonetheless, their software is better described as "open core".
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.
It feels like at first, Gitlab was trying to build a few great features, which is how we got CI, but then they started instead to focus on breadth, and that’s how we got everything else that’s now in the product.
I work for two clients (one of them is a huge German company) as a consultant who are both using GitLab simply because they can host it on their infrastructure. Makes it easier for them to satisfy internal security policies I guess.
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 needing to generate as much revenue as possible to satisfy their investors. Github is not in this position anymore.
> 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.
Like any big company, they have no ideology beyond making money. That actually makes it easy to trust them in a certain sense: they're not going to do things that don't benefit them, but they're not going to do something utterly crazy the way ideology-driven organizations can.
I agree that the main reason they're doing good things for developers is to get developers on board. But that doesn't negate that they're doing good things for developers.
But that's the whole problem with "trusting" microsoft. Their stated motto used to be "embrace, extend, extinguish". How do we know that has seriously changed on all levels?
I do not believe that Microsoft is fundamentally on board with the open source model. Its an alliance of convenience. If suddenly they think they can make more money some other way, they'll do that. They might not even actually destroy anything explicitly, merely ruin things out of indifference.
I honestly didn't think they stood a chance.
I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team on their successful exit!