At first I saw "to focus on his health" and assumed it was typical PR speak to cover someone asked to leave, but the amount of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem otherwise. I'd noticed he wasn't as often active in Gitlab related threads, and I guess that explains that too. Hope the recovery continues to go well.
---
I do think the change in leadership is probably more a continuation of Gitlab moving from a developer focused company to one focused on enterprise sales, so the product is probably going to continue to feel less interesting for me. They were pretty innovative in how open they were, so I hope at least some of that survives.
mgfist 19 days ago [-]
I don't think companies ever use "health" as cover to fire someone, even that is a step to far. Usually they say "personal reasons" or "to spend time with family", or "mutually beneficial" etc.. "Health" is usually something quite serious.
tuananh 19 days ago [-]
> On today’s earnings call, I am announcing that I am transitioning from my role as GitLab’s CEO and will serve as the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love is not easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for GitLab.
Indeed, he has cancer.
jedberg 18 days ago [-]
Usually when a the founding CEO of a public company steps into a strategic non-operations position, it's basically their way of saying "I'm taking the money and retiring" without tanking the stock by just leaving.
By taking a strategic role, investors are less worried because they know the CEO is still around.
But in this case it looks like it is legitimately a health reason. I hope he heals quickly.
tuananh 19 days ago [-]
> On today’s earnings call, I am announcing that I am transitioning from my role as GitLab’s CEO and will serve as the Executive Chair of the Board. I want more time to focus on my cancer treatment and health. My treatments are going well, my cancer has not metastasized, and I'm working towards making a full recovery. Stepping down from a role that I love is not easy, but I believe that it is the right decision for GitLab.
He has cancer.
lolinder 19 days ago [-]
> but the amount of detail on sytse's cancer makes it seem otherwise. I'd noticed he wasn't as often active in Gitlab related threads, and I guess that explains that too. Hope the recovery continues to go well.
OP got to that.
Macha 16 days ago [-]
Yeah, I tried to separate the two statements but I guess it wasn't clear. I'm not saying he was pushed out and they used the cancer as an excuse.
I was saying the choice of a business-focused replacement with a track record of prepping companies for acquisition (vs say getting someone internal or with a more engineering track record) is a sign of changing direction, however.
beanjuiceII 18 days ago [-]
bill staples was brought on new relic to sell the company, now he's brought onto gitlab to do the same
bastardoperator 18 days ago [-]
How do they intend on competing in the enterprise space? MSFT and Atlassian will happily bundle their SCM offering for 0 dollars if you spend enough on licensing other core products like visual studio or jira.
Macha 16 days ago [-]
While I haven't been directly involved in the negotiations, at three separate companies the internal comments indicated that what they were quoted for GitHub Enterprise Server pricing was just not in the same universe as Gitlab EE.
One migrated from Github Enterprise Server explicitly as a cost saving measure. One migrated from Bitbucket Server because the writing seemed very much on the wall for Atlassian's self-hosted solution with the Jira pricing model change and a trial migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud had gone so badly the whole thing was called off (though they did pay up for JIRA Data Center, JIRA was deemed less replaceable than Bitbucket apparently). The last went from Gitlab CE to Gitlab EE, so maybe there wasn't the hardest investigation of alternatives on that one, but they did at least claim they looked at Github Enterprise server as an alternative.
Now none of these companies used Exchange, Azure, Office, Teams, etc. etc. so maybe there's a bunch more discounts and synergy if you're fully bought into the MS ecosystem
bastardoperator 14 days ago [-]
We can see looking at both websites that GitHub is drastically cheaper on paper alone when it comes to enterprise. GitLab would have to be undercutting their premium offering by almost a third of the price to match GitHub which seems doubtful even if you have something like a volume discount.
sqs 19 days ago [-]
Congratulations and thank you to Sid, the GitLab CEO, for building an incredible company and product.
GitLab was the first code host to add more products (CI, security, ops, helpdesk, analytics, etc.) and create a whole suite, and GitHub followed. GitLab also built for the enterprise years before GitHub started to give appropriate love to the enterprise. Some people think that GitLab is a GitHub clone. Quite the opposite!
Even if you don't use GitLab yourself, you've been a huge beneficiary of the dev workflow GitLab envisioned and created, and of the competition they've given to Microsoft/GitHub. Competition in this space makes everything better.
hardwaresofton 18 days ago [-]
> GitLab was the first code host to add more products (CI, security, ops, helpdesk, analytics, etc.) and create a whole suite, and GitHub followed.
Disclaimer: I've worked with Sid and his team in the past.
Few people realize how long it's been since GitLab was a simple clone -- there has been a ton of legitimate net new innovation, and that happened under Sid (and of course all the awesome people working at GitLab).
Another thing that's actually insanely under-discussed is how openly GitLab runs and how that's been a successful model for them. I'm not sure I know another open core company that has been so successful in the space of developers who bend over backwards to pay nothing and spend hours of their own time (read $$$$$) to host their own <X>.
IMO they are the only credible competitor to GitHub, and they're open core, huge open source orgs, small companies, and large companies trust them (rightfully so), and they've built this all while being incredibly open and to this day you can still self-host their core software (which is a force multiplier for software companies).
jeroenhd 18 days ago [-]
Gitlab used to stand alone in the "Github replacement" market, but these days Gitea is quickly closing in on them. I hope the competition will drive Gitlab to continue to compete, but the switch to "AI everything" makes me weary for its future.
Without Gitlab, Github would've taken years, maybe even longer, to develop what it has become today. I don't think Gitea and its forks would exist.
Now if only Github would go the extra mile and copy another feature from Gitlab (IPv6 support)…
itronitron 18 days ago [-]
GitLab is currently marketing itself as the "AI-powered DevSecOps platform" which in my view ditches it's history/brand as an open and transparent alternative to GitHub.
whazor 18 days ago [-]
But GitHub enterprise is not a great product. So the other around, I wouldn't want to call Github a credible competitor to Gitlab.
mikepurvis 19 days ago [-]
Indeed. Github Actions runs because GitLab CI walked and Travis crawled. There's a clear evolution through line with how each laid the groundwork for the successor.
benatkin 18 days ago [-]
I disagree that GitHub Actions is much more powerful than GitLab. Both can be helped by a YC company, depot.dev, if you literally mean running containers quickly and reliably. GitHub Actions can be easier to set up if you like having stuff outside of your repo and an OCI image. GitLab may not have the actions library that GitHub has but it can pull docker images and that’s a powerful build library.
orf 17 days ago [-]
> I disagree that GitHub Actions is much more powerful than GitLab
It is, by leagues.
Even something simple like running a step before clone/checkout is impossible with Gitlab CI, let alone any of the actual powerful stuff.
mikepurvis 17 days ago [-]
GitLab CI can suppress the checkout altogether, do stuff, and then trigger a downstream job.
But really that’s emblematic of the whole thing, where some particular workflow is possible but extremely awkward and hacky. You feel like you’re fighting the system and wish you were just writing whatever it is as a few lines of groovy in a Jenkinsfile.
orf 17 days ago [-]
With great power comes great responsibility, and the responsibility to maintain what started out as “a few lines of groovy” is not one I’d ever take up again.
There’s a middle ground between overly flexible and very constrained, and I think GitHub actions nails that.
Individual steps/actions are reusable components with clear interfaces, which is tied together by a simple workflow engine. This decoupling is great, and allows independent evolution.
As a point to this: GitHub actions doesn’t even offer git clone functionality: it doesn’t care about it. Everyone uses the core “GitHub/checkout” action, but there is nothing special about it.
The same for caching - the workflow/steps engine doesn’t give two shits about that. The end result of this decoupling is things like sccache and docker can offer native integrations with the cache system, because it’s a separate thing.
mikepurvis 18 days ago [-]
Ah interesting, yeah the whole container build -> CI build has been a long-standing paint point for me across Github, GitLab, and even Jenkins. I will investigate what depot.dev is doing.... cause yeah, proper and intelligent on-demand rebuilding of based containers could be a game changer.
kylegalbraith 18 days ago [-]
One of the founders of Depot here. Always feel free to ping me directly (email in my bio) if you ever want to chat more about container builds in general.
mikepurvis 18 days ago [-]
For sure! I've always felt like a bit of a loner in that the assumption in most of these platforms is that your build starts with either something barebones (just apt) or maybe your platform only (python3:latest).
However, I've typically dealt with builds that have a very heavy dependency load (10-20GB) where it isn't desirable to install everything every time— I'd rather have an intermediate "deps" container that the build can start from. But I don't want to have to manually lifecycle that container; if I have a manifest of what's in my apt repo vs the current container, it should just know automatically when a container rebuild is required.
tuananh 19 days ago [-]
- Previously in 2017, Bill Staples was brought in Marketo for the sole purpose of prepping the company before selling. 2018, Marketo was acquired by Adobe.
- 2021, Bill becomes CEO of NewRelic. 2023, NewRelic was acquired.
I'm seeing a pattern here.
csunbird 18 days ago [-]
> Adobe announced that it's acquiring Marketo, a company that sells marketing software, from Vista Equity Partners for $4.75 billion
> New Relic to be Acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 Billion
Sounds like he is good salesman, the numbers are quite good.
18 days ago [-]
kevinsync 19 days ago [-]
I always liked Gitlab a lot better than Github, and I can't even pinpoint exactly why. Just something about the tactility of it, the ~-vibes-~ ..
I also bought some stock a while back because I liked the product -- praise Jah if they all make out like bandits if it sells, I just hope the new owner doesn't let the product shit the bed.
RainyDayTmrw 19 days ago [-]
I'm pessimistic about GitLab, given the state and trajectory of GitLab CI, which should be a core product for them. It's not in a good place, and it's not receiving the attention it needs, for being a core part of their platform. Being required to use GitLab CI causes me pain and frustration on a daily basis.
If the other commenters are correct that the new CEO has a track record of pursuing private equity type acquisitions, then I fear GitLab CI is destined to become the next Travis CI.
datenhorst 18 days ago [-]
Can I ask what specific pain points you have with Gitlab CI? I've been using it extensively the last couple of years and all in all it's been a pretty smooth experience!
RainyDayTmrw 18 days ago [-]
* Doesn't scale. In many places. In particular, GitLab CI is required to use GitLab's Gitaly for Git replication. Gitaly has architectural limitations on throughput, which are surprisingly easy to hit with even a medium sized team. Certain otherwise reasonable patterns, particularly child pipelines, cause severe load amplification with Gitaly.
* Bad error handling. Ruby errors leak through. Although the underlying error is my user error, returning it to me as an underlying Ruby exception is really unhelpful. It basically shows that they didn't validate inputs at all. The input is trusted, so it's probably not a security issue, but it's a huge usability and developer experience issue.
* Config format is weird and deficient. Surprisingly difficult to programmatically generate. Can't generate new jobs into the current pipeline. Must generate child pipelines. See above for the load amplification issue therein.
cyberpunk 18 days ago [-]
Wow having gone from gitlab to gh actions I miss gitlab ci massively.
GitHub actions still aren’t k8s native, you actually have to install docker on your “runners” like it’s the year 2010. Pitiful.
lol768 17 days ago [-]
Yeah - and as a result of that, the builds I do for .NET in GitHub Actions are an order of magnitude quicker to run than the previous pipelines I had in GitLab, where everything was painfully slow because it all ran inside Docker.
I get the point about it not being ideal for self-hosted runners, not having ephemeral storage etc. But I disagree that the hosted GitHub Actions runners don't provide a good experience. If your build needs it - e.g. you're building something to deploy to your K8s cluster, use your Dockerfile and build in Docker. If you just want to compile some code, what's the point?
anotheranon867 18 days ago [-]
Anon for reasons. I worked with Bill at Microsoft. Bill was fired from Microsoft along with most of his cronies who almost managed to completely tank Azure.
He is the guy responsible for the absolute train wreck that was the Azure portal v2 (post silver light) and v3 (Ibiza). He lied to Scott Guthrie, buried efforts to benchmark or in any way measure CSAT or usability, and stabbed many many people in the back.
Dude was also borderline incompetent.
His partner and buddy in the whole fraud was Jonah Sterling who managed to continue to get promoted and is one of the top design leaders at Microsoft despite having zero UX/UI/Interaction skills or knowledge and costing Microsoft years of wasted effort and ruining many design careers by overpromoting his directs to boost his own career trajectory.
After working with so many Microsoft execs who were either astoundingly incompetent or downright malicious people - it saddens me every time I see another one get named to a csuite of another company.
corytheboyd 18 days ago [-]
It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it!
Narretz 19 days ago [-]
> GitLab Inc., (NASDAQ: GTLB), the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform
Oh, that description explains why the core pipeline authoring and capabilities have made almost no progress in the last few years. I actually thought gitlab still branded itself as a "classic" dev ops tool.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
I was actually looking at them as a GitHub alternative and their homepage has so much vaporware AI BS on it that’s as far as I got.
Ironically I was very open to paying for a service, but the “AI AI AI!” lost them at least one sale.
itronitron 18 days ago [-]
I was at a 'techtalk' recently with over 100 attendees, where Gitlab was a sponsor and the second of two talks. Before either talk the GitLab person gave a short pitch on the whole GitLab AI developer productivity vision and how great they are.
There was a short break after the first talk concluded during which about a third of the attendees left, myself included.
throwaway2037 18 days ago [-]
I am confused. What is the lesson to be learnt here? Did the last two talks look boring? ... And that is why you left? Were people annoyed with pre-talk pitch by GitLab?
an-honest-moose 18 days ago [-]
People heard the AI spiel and lost interest.
lolinder 19 days ago [-]
This press release makes a big deal out of them counting "more than 50% of the Fortune 100" as customers, which goes a long way towards explaining their decline in favor among devs. They're not interested in your sale any more, they're only interested in large enterprises, and are apparently doing very well in that market.
stackskipton 19 days ago [-]
I doubt 50% of Fortune 100 customers are all in on GitLab. My guess is most of their F100 customers are acquisitions that were using Gitlab and continue to use Gitlab.
When my company was acquired by $MegaCorp, I noted one of vendors was like "trusted by $MegaCorp" because yes technically, they got a check from $MegaCorp but $MegaCorp was not interested in becoming further customer.
scaryclam 18 days ago [-]
Or one or two devs in the F100 customers made an account using their work email so they could chuck some OSS prototype code somewhere, or test something out.
jamesfinlayson 19 days ago [-]
Yes I've seen it a place I've worked - GitLab is pushing hard on AI right now, and I don't believe it's cheap either.
Ironically, the JetBrains autocomplete is better than their DUO plugin - JetBrains is faster and the GitLab plugin causes my IDE to completely lock up at least once a day.
vundercind 19 days ago [-]
Wow. Almost none of those words would have even been among my third-string choices of words to use to describe gitlab in one short sentence. “The” and “platform” might have made it.
remram 19 days ago [-]
"The other code hosting platform"?
vundercind 19 days ago [-]
“GitHub for if you compete with MS and someone high in your org is concerned about letting MS host your code.”
“GitHub with a worse UI except GitHub’s has been getting worse for years so now they’re both similarly bad so never mind”
“Worse gitea but with more features so sometimes it’s better”
jamesfinlayson 19 days ago [-]
Having used GitLab Enterprise, I'd describe it as having 99% of the features that you could ever want, but those features are generally executed no more than 75% well.
whatsakandr 19 days ago [-]
I used to think gitlab was the bees knees, but more recently there's just a lack of user awareness. They've had a open issue for years about failing a job due to not finding artifacts. The logs even say "ERROR"
I've concluded they're now a marketing organization.
HdS84 19 days ago [-]
It's normal to Google "how to do x in gitlab" and then there is a ticker in their issue tracker to add x from 2018. GL employees all agrees that it would be great. Thrn there are 374747 label changes and no resolution until today.
usr1106 18 days ago [-]
While this is not a completely wrong observation, it's worse for Atlassian BitBucket. With github I have no experience.
progval 18 days ago [-]
This is common for huge open source projects. However, when you send a patch to Gitlab, they will assign someone to guide you through the process, and the patch will be merged eventually unless you bail out or they outright reject it.
I love that it implies there is a more comprehensive DevSecOps platform that isn't AI-powered.
remram 19 days ago [-]
Or search. What a useless devops platform if you can't find issue by searching for words that appear in comments. Only words appearing in the issue title/description are found and this is infuriating every day.
Can't believe they'd put "AI-powered" there when it can't even be used to find exact word matches.
tolerable 19 days ago [-]
Good luck sytse. We love you!
stavros 19 days ago [-]
I was a huge Gitlab fan until their pricing change. I don't remember the pricing specifics, but the tier breakdown was such that you could introduce GitLab for free to a company that used Github, use it alongside Github, and slowly switch repo by repo, which was a very effective strategy (I used it in a few companies I joined).
After the pricing change, you had to start paying immediately (from the 6th user onwards or something), which made it a nonstarter because no company would start immediately paying for a Github replacement they didn't even know they wanted.
Together with Github being priced very cheaply, plus having free private repos, plus having the entire OSS world on it (for my OSS projects), I switched to it and never looked back.
senorsmile 6 days ago [-]
This affected my company. Thet got rid of the "starter" tier at $6 / user / month. That meant going up to the premium tier at $19. Just a couple years later that has gone up to $29. For a company that already has other tools for all of the "extra value add" that they're bringing, it hurts. Gitlab really has a great feature set for the core git server + ci experience, it's not worth so much. I've asked several different folks to bring back a starter license to no avail. We want to pay, but we don't use any of the "premium" add-ons.
freedomben 19 days ago [-]
Same. That pricing change was one of the dumbest moves I can remember from a tech company. It should be the textbook example of a short-term profit grab at the complete sacrifice of long-term strategy.
I was a huge gitlab fan and would not have thought much of anything else, but the pricing made that impossible. The product has also suffered greatly as a result of the years of poor decision making at the top. It's one of the most unfortunate outcomes I can recall.
sofixa 18 days ago [-]
> short-term profit grab
They still don't make a profit. So much more a "try to become profitable in a changing financial landscape that will give us much less runway to do so" than "short-term profit grab"
tapoxi 19 days ago [-]
Sid was diagnosed with osteosarcoma a while back, so hopefully he's on the road to recovery but stepping down isn't usually a sign things are going smoothly.
kmbfjr 19 days ago [-]
That kind of diagnosis profoundly changes you, I know after having two cancer diagnoses in a year.
For him, it may be bad, or it may be just realizing either outcome, time is short.
righthand 19 days ago [-]
Glad I got out years ago after the price dropped and never recovered. Going public was not good for consumers or investors.
tombert 19 days ago [-]
Yeah, I am still holding onto my couple shares. I am down about $98, and if this is just a bit to get acquired, I suspect they’re going to force me to sell my shares at their current price.
redeux 19 days ago [-]
So, do we think Staples and the board intend to sell Gitlab to private equity like New Relic?
andy_ppp 18 days ago [-]
I wish Gitlab would spend more time thinking through the best way to do things rather than just adding as many features as they can. From what I’ve seen (my usage of both products) they don’t have a single feature that works as well as GitHub even though they probably have feature parity in theory.
tyre 19 days ago [-]
> GitLab Inc., (NASDAQ: GTLB), the most comprehensive AI-powered DevSecOps platform
AzzieElbab 19 days ago [-]
They should place their Git backend on the blockchain to collect all the power stones.
cyberax 19 days ago [-]
Git is already a blockchain.
pests 19 days ago [-]
Technically but not in terms people would describe a block chain. It's a chain of blocks yes, but its not the same.
ktpsns 18 days ago [-]
Git repositories are hash trees. The distributed nature of git is a bit different but it shares similiarities. Definitly has the crypto checkmarks ticked.
Diti 18 days ago [-]
AFAIK, the main thing that makes a blockchain a “blockchain” in the cryptocurrency sense, is the handling of consensus in case of double spend (race condition during a transaction), also known as Byzantine fault. Not really something Git has been built for.
keyle 19 days ago [-]
Thanks for pointing that out, that made me gulp and I'm not even sure what 'Sec' they're talking about seeing they were recently featured in a defcon talk.
HdS84 19 days ago [-]
They have a sast scanner offering..we tried to use it
Basic thinks like "ignore this slew of reporting because the build is already deprecated" or "always ignore this error, false positive" are missing. The last few years gitlab only did marketing checklist driven development.
jamesfinlayson 19 days ago [-]
Yes, I've used it and the behaviour that we saw was it reporting every issue that had been in the repo ever (including in files that had been deleted). Which I suppose you might want, but every other scanning tool I've used chose the sensible default of scan what is there now.
Also, as far as I can, the security centre wouldn't let you download a .csv of current security issues in the repo - the UI lets you do a bunch of filtering, but the .csv always gives you everything, including issues that you've closed.
HdS84 19 days ago [-]
It's even worse when you scan your build artifacts, in our case containers. Each build added to the list , with no way to delete all stuff. Filtering and grouping are also missing.
We gave up on that and decided to use another tool.
My gripe with GL is that all features are like this now. There is no invest into the basic building blocks, just yapping for the next trend. Most customers for GL use it on premise because they want to use it on prem. I would focus on Features that benefit that crowd, but hey I am just an developing not a gilded c suite.
vundercind 19 days ago [-]
To be fair, having the “Sec” in your “DevSecOps” signify nothing whatsoever is basically the industry standard for companies describing their offerings with that term.
amatuer_sodapop 19 days ago [-]
I think AI-powered is fast approaching the "webscale" status.
eddythompson80 19 days ago [-]
It's already there. Plenty of developer focused docs have been updated to mention AI however possible. I was just reading stripe docs, and was surprised by the number of fairly old features that got a doc update so instead of saying "For example, if you're selling a digital subscription with a physical item" to "For example, if you're selling access to an AI service with a physical item".
Or replacing "For example, If you're charging for API requests" to "For example, If you're charging for LLama AI Model API requests".
Heck, I had to review a doc change at work that was pretty stupid. Like one thing we offer is an S3-compatible endpoint. But someone thought we should clarify that you can upload AI models there too and all our docs should include an "AI developer" section for how to upload a blob that also happen to be a model or a lora or whatever.
mattgreenrocks 19 days ago [-]
Has a real “how do you do, fellow kids?” energy to it.
eddythompson80 19 days ago [-]
That’s exactly the feeling I got but didn’t know how to put into words.
Macha 19 days ago [-]
You don't happen to work at Minio do you?
Because apparently Minio is for AI these days: https://min.io/
eddythompson80 19 days ago [-]
Ha that’s hilarious! And no I work at another tech company, but I totally understand how minio decided to go with that marketing. It’s really infuriating and yet understandable.
When the AI craze stated, so many people in my company came to me asking “if we can run AI workload”? another thing we offer is fairly generic compute meant for your average web applications or micro service etc. Initially I said “I don’t think so. We don’t have GPUs nor do we have any ability to express hardware requirements beyond CPU and Memory. We’ll need to do some work to include GPU into that”.
Then hilariously I learned that you don’t need GPUs or ASICs to be able to run “AI workloads”. If your compute allows you to call OpenAI rest APIs, then you’re also “AI Ready”.
labster 19 days ago [-]
GTLB is perfect for ESG investing because it’s powered entirely from hot air generated by buzzwords.
cedws 19 days ago [-]
The what?
dijit 19 days ago [-]
You know… the disruptive, game-changing tech company redefining source code hosting for the modern enterprise. Their cloud-native, next-gen platform is engineered for scalable, seamless integration with your DevOps pipeline, delivering end-to-end automation and real-time collaboration. Powered by AI-driven insights and built for maximum uptime, they offer enterprise-grade security, unmatched interoperability, and hyper-optimized CI/CD workflows. With a global, distributed infrastructure, they guarantee future-proof performance that accelerates your agile transformation—because your innovation deserves nothing less than excellence.
or.. something.
richbell 19 days ago [-]
No single pane of glass is a deal-breaker for me, sorry.
swozey 19 days ago [-]
They built a very nice declarative CI/CD system before Github Actions existed. I think I was on Bamboo (and Jenkins) before going over to Gitlab and it was a breath of fresh air, a huge understatement. 2015ish.
nojs 19 days ago [-]
It’s the tagline in the hero shot on their homepage too.
tqi 19 days ago [-]
Sounds like Gitlab hired the "Category Design Advisors" from Play Bigger LLC...
dysoco 19 days ago [-]
Yeah I chuckled at that
18 days ago [-]
acuozzo 18 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, nominative determinism did not strike again in this case. Boo.
19 days ago [-]
luuurker 19 days ago [-]
Cancer... hope the treatment is working well and wish you a full recovery.
_joel 18 days ago [-]
I've found Gitlab to be quite flaky these past few months. I hope they concentrate on fixing things rather than getting ready to sell, but I won't hold my breath.
jlengrand 19 days ago [-]
"Not CEO of Gitlab here", for those who have been here long enough to recognize this. Really hope you're doing ok buddy.
fosefx 18 days ago [-]
Aside: What makes Gitlab "AI-powered"?
Cupprum 18 days ago [-]
The press release is not that long, but it contains "AI-powered DevSecOps platform" 4 times :D so its just a buzzword.
_joel 18 days ago [-]
They've got a copliot like code suggestions thingy.
Vosporos 18 days ago [-]
Ah well fuck, looks like some projects will have to move to Forgejo
MiggiV2 18 days ago [-]
I'm eager to see how this unfolds, and I'm hoping for the best for Bill.
seeksky 18 days ago [-]
What about gitlab now
revskill 19 days ago [-]
The cost of maintainance a Rails app is huge, due to dynamic typings.
aestetix 19 days ago [-]
Maybe now they will change their stupid pricing plan and let people pay monthly.
Edit: I did not see before that Sid had cancer. I send him wishes for a good recovery!
guybrush0123 19 days ago [-]
> As CEO at New Relic, Staples’ strategic leadership and deep product knowledge significantly increased the company’s enterprise value. By accelerating revenue and driving increased profitability, he made New Relic one of the most broadly adopted platforms in its category. Staples has nearly 30 years of experience building developer platforms and serving developers as customers. Prior to New Relic, he spent many years at Microsoft and Adobe in executive leadership roles, building and scaling several multi-billion-dollar businesses.
On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.
Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.
He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
njtransit 19 days ago [-]
Rumors are that Gitlab is for sale, so the move might make sense in that regard.
jmclnx 19 days ago [-]
Yes, I heard this rumor right after I moved from github to gitlab. Well if I have to go elsewhere at least gitlab will archive my abandoned free account for me :)
FWIW, I found them easier to deal wit than github, so will hang tight to see how this plays out.
addicted 19 days ago [-]
I’m curious why you would move to Gitlab.
Nothing they’ve done since they were created has ever moved them in a more open source friendly direction, and they’ve broken a ton of promises both implicit and explicit along the way.
GitHub OTOH has only become more open source friendly (minus the AI stuff, but I suspect Gitlab is no better on that front).
flohofwoe 18 days ago [-]
One feature area where Gitlab is still better for realworld stuff is CI (Gitlab CI vs Github Actions). Yes, you can do most things on both, but Gitlab CI makes a lot more sense.
In general, Github still feels like it's built for hobby coders (focusing on simplicity instead of configurability - which doesn't have to be a bad thing) while Gitlab feels like it's built for professional teams from the ground up.
usr1106 18 days ago [-]
I have used Gitlab CI basically daily for over 5 years and it makes sense. I would need to think hard to come up with something that seems fundamentally wrong.
I have never used Github Actions. Can you explain or give some examples what doesn't make sense?
flohofwoe 18 days ago [-]
IIRC Github Actions started as a 'visual editor' where you would drop and arrange 'Actions' and define the data flow between actions, but what most people want from a CI system is just a script/config file in their git repo which defines what command line tools to run, and to group those commands in jobs dependending on each other so that some jobs can run in parallel (which Github Actions only implemented as an afterthought after users demanded it).
To reuse code, Gitlab CI has simple template files which you can import into your toplevel .gitlab-ci.yml, and you have an inheritance system to derive new jobs from other jobs. That's a very simple and powerful system.
Code reuse in Github works with above mentioned 'actions' where each action seems to be a whole repository of stuff instead of a single file like in Gitlab CI.
Gitlab CI seems to be designed by people who know what they do and what their users need, while Github Actions seems to be designed by architecture astronauts, and has only afterwards and reluctantly been hammered into a shape where it does the things most users expect.
noirscape 18 days ago [-]
GitHub Actions feels like it was first designed to let people customize the GitHub Pages deploy flow (since GitHub by default only offered Jekyll as a static site generator, and Jekyll is Ruby tooling and not lightweight to run at all) and as a CI tool second, being molded into behaving like one after Travis CI went bad for open source projects.
Gitlab CI actually seems like it was made for CI in the first place.
miohtama 18 days ago [-]
GitHub Actions is rebranded Microsoft Azure product AFAIK
Dykam 17 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure of the same, and that feature actually leaks into the implementation. Right after the initial introduction of the current Github Actions, we translated some Azure Devops scripts to Actions and a lot of the structure and most keywords where nearly identical. As well as the interface when running the CI.
omcnoe 18 days ago [-]
If I remember correctly GitHub CI is pretty much a straight port of Microsoft’s existing Azure DevOps CI, done pretty soon after the acquisition. The rest of Azure DevOps UX is kinda insane so it’s no surprise the CI is a bit of a pain too.
DanielHB 18 days ago [-]
And Github Actions is somehow superior to CircleCI in many ways!
cmgbhm 18 days ago [-]
Understanding how tokens get passed around. The pattern in Gitlab seems to be much more explicit.
Protected branches and associated secrets. Much cleaner construct on gitlab.
GitHub actions defacto seems to be tracing yaml to compiled JavaScript to hopefully that right source to shell commands.
Gitlab seems to be yaml to shell commands.
Nested projects. Nice midspot between monorepo and access control management.
API. I may be out of date on it but I recall the gitlab apis as pretty sensible. The github apis for administration has a very odd rest/graphql split.
plantain 18 days ago [-]
Try and test a Github Action locally - it's an engineering project up there with the Space Shuttle.
Repositories around the world are filled with endless commits of "test1", "test2", "test3" trying to debug their actions in prod.
Right, but Gitlab does have the excellent built-in pipeline editor that will visualize and validate your pipelines for you.
It can also render the complete pipeline config (making it easy to run and debug the problematic parts locally just by copying the relevant parts, even if they're hidden in and include somewhere).
mhh__ 18 days ago [-]
I find them both equally bad just in different ways.
Compare the gitlab UI with phabricator for example. The workflows are mostly a strange mixture of whatever github made up on the back of a napkin and Stakeholder-consultant slop.
mathstuf 18 days ago [-]
GitLab has accepted my patches…do you have a timeline for when Github will do the same? Sure, maybe the directions are different, but the baselines couldn't be more different either.
Neat…though considering how far removed it is from the actual behaviors of the forge rather than things that are essentially "bikeshed topics", I'm still not very convinced that Github is even in the same league as GitLab in "OSS friendliness".
gbear605 19 days ago [-]
In my experience, Gitlab is a lot more stable than Github. My last job was on Github, and we had an outage a couple times a month at least. We even had a Slack emote for it! My current job is on Gitlab, and we haven’t had a single outage in the year that we’ve been on them.
elcritch 18 days ago [-]
Second that. My job before last moved to a locally hosted enterprise Github instance, which promptly ate itself. The specs required to run it were also impressive, something like 64gb minimum to boot but more was strongly recommended.
not_your_vase 18 days ago [-]
Haha, I keep getting burned by GitHub outages even as a private contributor with my personal account... speaking of which, I expect one outage soon, this week so far it has been available always when I needed it...
jraph 19 days ago [-]
What are you referring to?
Gitlab is open core, (not great but better than nothing) while github is zero open source.
sofixa 18 days ago [-]
GitHub is open source friendly on paper, but almost nothing they do is actually open source, or even source available. Contrast that to GitLab who are actually open core, and the vast majority of their software if publicly available for free with a very permissive license.
One talks about open source because it's the de facto home of open source. The other is actually open source.
imp0cat 18 days ago [-]
I may be biased, but one of the reasons probably is that it's not Microsoft.
foxhop 18 days ago [-]
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dec0dedab0de 18 days ago [-]
You can't self host Github.
eliaspro 18 days ago [-]
You can (Github Enterprise)!
elcritch 18 days ago [-]
If you're brave!
edm0nd 19 days ago [-]
I'm curious, why did you make such a move? Seems like it would be way better to work for Github and then try to bounce to somewhere inside MS instead.
javawizard 19 days ago [-]
I'm pretty sure GP is referring to moving between GitHub and GitLab as repository hosts, not as employers.
nyclounge 19 days ago [-]
Time to jump ship to codeberg/gitea? What are non commercial git repos now days?
freedomben 19 days ago [-]
I'll wait to jump ship until I see who buys them. It could end up being a huge positive for a gitlab. I have been very disappointed in their strategy the past few years and I think they squandered an enormous opportunity and amount of Goodwill with developers. If they got bought by somebody good, then I think it could end up being a massive positive.
rurp 19 days ago [-]
I used Gitlab at a previous job maybe four years ago and really liked the UI. Switching to Github at the new gig felt like a huge step backwards. That said, the product and business news I have seen regarding Gitlab since then has almost all been negative. Hopefully they are able to turn things around because at one point I really hoped they would overtake Github and thought it might happen.
Gigachad 19 days ago [-]
Microsoft buying GitHub seemed to be a huge benefit to GitHub at least.
Normal_gaussian 18 days ago [-]
GitHub was in an odd position; HR had politically captured every department. A buyout by someone so big was pretty much the only way to do it.
yeah, the product is great, but the pricing is a mess. If whoever buys it sorts that out it could be a win.
ksp-atlas 18 days ago [-]
Gitea became for profit, there's still a non profit fork called Forgejo which has become fairly popular
noirscape 18 days ago [-]
To elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open source.
The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it.
Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.)
It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.
a2128 18 days ago [-]
The ideological difference between the two projects really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really obvious when you look close)
Matumio 18 days ago [-]
Indeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits. When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page, you know the project is probably a community-driven effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.
nyclounge 18 days ago [-]
Thank you for sharing this. It make a huge difference for when we are choosing!
thinkyfish 19 days ago [-]
Forgejo jumps to mind.
joachimma 18 days ago [-]
Does anyone know why gitea is developed on GitHub?
For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features. Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out below to actually migrate all the existing data out of GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the priority list.
lotsofpulp 18 days ago [-]
Gitlab is a publicly traded company, it’s literally been for sale to anyone who wants it for 3 years.
If you made an offer to buy it for ~$15B right now, the board would basically have to approve the sale.
adastra22 19 days ago [-]
Who would buy it?
manquer 19 days ago [-]
Many options , older companies like IBM, Google, SAP, Oracle or even Salesforce (already own heroku in dev tooling space so not far fetched ) with stable or slowing market presence in engineering departments
Mid sized newer companies likes Hashicorp or datadog or vercel who target developers as customers .
Gitlab gives access to a large audience of developers to cross sell most dev tools so all these orgs can get a lot of returns paying more than the standalone value of gitlab itself.
The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave
susanthenerd 18 days ago [-]
> The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave
Did I miss something? Didn't IBM acquire Hashicorp?
manquer 19 days ago [-]
Yes they did, i should have clarified, as IBM is becoming like Broadcom as an umbrella organization for all sorts of companies, the ibm core is different beast than some of the acquisitions they have been making
In my mind just like LinkedIn , GitHub and Microsoft are every distinct entities with a lot of differences on how they work , Hashicorp and IBM parent are different and will remain so. Integrating into Hashicorp for Gitlab would be very different than integrating into IBM core with different values for both businesses .
firesteelrain 19 days ago [-]
GitLab Premium already integrates with HashiCorp Vault [1]
GitLab supports storing the Terraform state and includes Terraform templates however they are moving to OpenTofu in 18.x [2]
I wasn't thinking about a few focused features or integrations, but more generally. i.e non product things like sales and license packaging and son on.
If an acquisition has to make sense there should be a clear path to monetize it, for IBM core or its HashiCorp unit or any other buyer that will not just be through some light integrations alone, they can achieved with partnerships after all you don't need to buy the organization for it.
firesteelrain 18 days ago [-]
Agree. What did you have in mind? The two products are already lightly integrated.
bigfatkitten 18 days ago [-]
Salesforce let Heroku wither and die. I don't see them sticking their toes into the dev tooling space again anytime soon.
Given New Relic is a direct competitor, Bill Staples' background makes even more sense.
mrweasel 18 days ago [-]
Why? And why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?
I seriously don't understand the deals being made in tech. Most of the makes no sense, not even retrospectively. I get Microsoft buying Github, that was a part of their open source strategy and they've always put a high value on developers.
michaelt 18 days ago [-]
> why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?
I wouldn't buy them for that myself, but Gitlab made $200 million in revenue in Q3 2024 [1]. So $800 million a year in revenue.
The way the present their numbers is pretty hard to understand, at least for me, did they lose $28million or make $28million in that same quarter? Either way that seems insanely low, if they're expected to be worth $8billion. The gap between profit and revenue seems to high.
There might be some potential for Gitlab complement your other business, in which case you may not see the lack of profit as that big of an issue. The problem is that if you can't make those $8billions back in future profit, then you're going to start making changes to the Gitlab offerings until they do become profitable.
That might be what the new CEO is suppose to do, pump up those numbers, and make it look like a sane investment.
jmclnx 19 days ago [-]
Maybe IBM since I think Gnome and a few other large projects moved there. Plus since AI is all the rage, I can see someone picking it up.
The main question is probably the price.
freedomben 19 days ago [-]
I was thinking about that as well, given that it seems it would fit in well with the red hat portfolio. They don't as far as I know. Have a good answer for a gitforge, and the phenomenal CI CD offering that gitlab has would be very marketable to Red hat customers.
I would be excited if IBM acquired them and put them under the red hat umbrella, because as history has shown, it may mean that gitlab ends up becoming much more open. They may open up the entire product instead of doing the open core model.
throwaway2037 18 days ago [-]
Please correct me if wrong. Red Hat has OpenShift Cloud, which I think has Git repo hosting, including CI/CD.
2000swebgeek 19 days ago [-]
I think its right time for AWS to buy.
AWS shut down their service, if AWS can "easily" integrate with Gitlab, I see a lot of potential on the deployment side to increase AWS revenue.
aravindputrevu 19 days ago [-]
Google should do it. If some CorpDev of theirs are listening. This could be their Satya Nadella <> GitHib moment to bring back the lost shine.
makeitdouble 19 days ago [-]
This makes a lot of sense, and is truly frightening.
Google isn't know for its hands-off approach nor long term view for service growths. Gitlab is essential to balance Github's impact, I'd hate it to go in the graveyard.
N19PEDL2 18 days ago [-]
I sincerely hope it's not Broadcom. A 10x price increase would scare away a lot of customers.
clhodapp 19 days ago [-]
Atlassian?
n_ary 19 days ago [-]
They have Bitbucket already.
rickette 18 days ago [-]
Most of these sales aren't about acquiring a product but about acquiring a customer base, so it would make perfect sense for Atlassian IMHO.
codegeek 19 days ago [-]
Microsoft :)
cocoa19 19 days ago [-]
Would make no sense. They already own the most popular service, owning the second one may bring monopoly scrutiny.
manquer 19 days ago [-]
Won’t be allowed ? They already own GitHub
FooBarWidget 18 days ago [-]
How does this make sense? Gitlab is a public company, it's already for sale to anyone.
sgt 18 days ago [-]
A lot more goes into selling a company or a controlling share. All the ducks in a row and the company really needs to prove that it is worth X price.
echelon 19 days ago [-]
GitLab doesn't really make sense as an independent company.
Horrific outcomes: Atlassian, Oracle, or IBM buys it.
Great outcomes: Google, Amazon, or JetBrains ($7B private valuation) buys it.
mrweasel 18 days ago [-]
Why would Google want it? They shutdown Google code and Amazon is shutting down CodeCommit.
I think it would make more sense for a number of companies to invest in Gitlab, to ensure that there is a 3rd. party tool available, as to not "force" users into the hands of Github and Microsoft.
That's probably the best case, Google, Amazon, IBM, JetBrains and a few others create a company, with themselves on the board, and tasks that company with buying and running Gitlab. Having Google alone buy it and you may as well just migrate now pending the inevitable disinterest and shutdown. So I guess that I disagree, Gitlab makes more sense as an independent company, that it does as part of companies that already had failed competing products.
My guess is the ever popular MicroFocus (Now OpenText) who will buy everything that it on the edge of popularity.
BadHumans 19 days ago [-]
JetBrains buying it would be out of left field but makes sense in some sense and would be the best possible outcome.
Macha 19 days ago [-]
I'm not sure if Jetbrains is bigger than I expected or Gitlab smaller, but it feels to me that Jetbrains wouldn't be able to afford Gitlab.
reaperman 19 days ago [-]
It would be roughly a merger of equals (1-2 billion either direction), and I'm not sure how that could be financed without JetBrains giving up too much control over their own existing company. Perhaps a bank could extend a private loan if they believed in JetBrains ability to use the merger to grow both sides of the merged company.
vasco 18 days ago [-]
Gitlab is worth $10B on the public market right now without an acquisition premium. You're very far.
reaperman 17 days ago [-]
Ah wow, my apologies. I didn’t realize it was publicly traded! I used very inappropriate sources for that valuation…most likely super outdated without realizing it.
brobdingnagians 18 days ago [-]
Jetbrains decided to go from the Space product to a cut down Space Code product with just code review and git hosting, but then this last week announced they will be shuttering even that next year. I doubt they want to get back into the git hosting, if they did by buying GitLab, that would be odd.
TiredOfLife 18 days ago [-]
Jetbrains already has TeamCity and Youtrack
apocalyptic0n3 18 days ago [-]
They also had Space (discontinued in May) and Space Code (discontinued last week). I don't think GitLab makes much sense for them
firesteelrain 19 days ago [-]
Atlassian has their own Cloud offerings and their data center versions of Jira, BitBucket and Confluence are very good.
I don’t see GitLab replacing BitBucket.
acdha 19 days ago [-]
They’ve been pushing customers to their cloud versions pretty hard and holding back features. Jira and Confluence are decent but BitBucket is like time-traveling back to 2010. We migrated to GitLab with unanimous enthusiasm – so many new features, so many things worked better - and that decision felt better as the years passed where we’d get “is anyone working on this?” updates on the Atlassian tickets for missing BitBucket features which had been years old when I’d voted for them.
firesteelrain 19 days ago [-]
Our developers want GitLab because it means replacing Bamboo which is an OK product but we have hundreds of build agents that don’t scale for on prem. Each agent is a VM running on VMWare. The pipeline’s are so much better.
But GitLab price annually for the same amount of users that we have for Bamboo and BitBucket is higher in licensing fees. We have to do things self hosted because of regulatory and compliance reasons.
There is probably a business case to be made for the inefficiency that we see with Bamboo.
BitBucket DC is pretty solid and never goes down. It integrates well with all the other Atlassian products like Jira or Confluence. Our instance is also highly available and fault tolerant.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
Eh, Google it goes to the graveyard (rip Google code), Amazon it gets buried, JetBrains would be cool tho.
acdha 19 days ago [-]
Amazon has an okay but underwhelming developer suite. If they bought Gitlab and did nothing other than say that they should have first class support for AWS deployments it’d be a good move, and that’s before you consider things like pivoting Gitlab’s struggling AI tools to theirs or aligning all of the supply-chain stuff big companies want.
cmckn 19 days ago [-]
CodeCommit is on the way out, onboarding was disabled over the summer.
Some of Google's best business units were acquisitions.
YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind, Firebase, HTC (Pixel)
Don't discount Google's M&A game.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
They kill more than they allow to live, and doubleclick slowly hollowed out Google search by skewing incentives away from great content to maximizing display revenue via link bait.
Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas’s is to Boeing.
evilduck 19 days ago [-]
Are any of those from the last decade? They acquired them when they were a different company.
mrpippy 19 days ago [-]
Don’t forget Docs (Wordly)
morgante 19 days ago [-]
I wouldn't consign it to the graveyard that quickly.
It's a lot easier/more common for Google to kill internal projects and small acquisitions.
A $16B write-down is far less likely, especially when many Googlers internally realize how much a threat Microsoft is with GitHub + VS Code.
adastra22 19 days ago [-]
Better comparison for Google would be YouTube.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
Yes but that’s also pre-Sundar Google when there was some semblance of vision. Now that Ruth runs the company behind the scenes with a vision timeline that is measured in exactly 3 month increments…well, good luck.
freedomben 19 days ago [-]
I certainly agree that a horrible outcome would be if atlassian or Oracle buys it, but IBM? If IBM acquires and puts it under the red hat umbrella, they have a history of opening up products that were previously more closed. Considering what they did with ansible, for example, would be amazing for gitlab.
angelaguilera 19 days ago [-]
> If IBM acquires and puts it under the red hat umbrella, they have a history of opening up products that were previously more closed.
As a former CentOS user, I politely disagree with this.
freedomben 18 days ago [-]
I appreciate the politeness :-)
Good point, red hat is far from perfect. The way they handled cent was incredibly disappointing.
woah 19 days ago [-]
What needs to be done to prepare it for sale?
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
Slash costs/headcount in short term, sell, pocket the cash and get the hell out of dodge.
guybrush0123 19 days ago [-]
Not necessarily. If you want the best price for the company, you might want to grow it before you sell it.
New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
Fair, hopefully the gitlab employees won’t get totally screwed!
bastardoperator 19 days ago [-]
They hired an axe man, people are getting hurt.
colechristensen 19 days ago [-]
There are plenty of due-diligence internal things that need to be put in order to make your company attractive. Processes, documentation, compliance, etc.
Then there are things like having roadmaps for the future to make you look attractive.
Then there are vulture things to make your numbers look good which can range from doing neglected cleanups of actually unnecessary costs to cutting costs in ways that really suck for customers and employees.
blackeyeblitzar 19 days ago [-]
Produce attractive numbers. Often by cutting costs.
johannes1234321 18 days ago [-]
Aside from things mentioned by others: Having a network to potential buyers.
antics 18 days ago [-]
> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
I think a lot of people would say this is not true. I worked with Bill a little at Microsoft, where he ran an x,000-person engineering org, and my experience was that he was a competent, detail-oriented, product-focused leader. You might disagree but, in any event, running an x,000-person org in a large tech company does qualify you for CEO positions, at least in the eyes of people who make those decisions.
anotheranon867 18 days ago [-]
He was fired from the same org. Several of his direct reports were also fired. He spent years trying to cover up major mistakes and oversights, and finally got caught red handed without anyone left to scapegoat. It wasn’t to an Elizabeth Holmes level, but he wasn’t that far away either.
This isn’t secondhand either. I witnessed him multiple times telling reports to bury findings, stop research that made the product look bad, and actively prevent anyone from going over his head to higher leadership.
paulddraper 18 days ago [-]
Yeah that's pretty relevant tech experience.
Not sure how much more relevant you can get....
xyst 18 days ago [-]
What a shame. A literal hatchet man
rkhleung 18 days ago [-]
Not necessarily. In my experience, getting the right person to prepare a company for an IPO or a sale is hard. Most buyers will do due diligence and besides 'slashing costs' and 'growing the company', there is a skill set for getting governance and compliance practices in place and as well as leading the roadshow for the sale which has some similarities to raising private capital. For instance, if you don't already have explicit policies for workplace safety and environmental practices (e.g. what do you recycle, water usage, etc), you will usually need to put these in place. (We invested in manufacturing and these were extremely important to us). If you are located in multiple jurisdictions, you need to be ready to demonstrate that you are in compliance with local regulations and pass the equivalent of "integration tests", prove you are in compliance across multiple jurisdictions where their rules may differ or seem to conflict. The CEO knows what needs to get done and has the rolodex to get the people to help the company get these things done for a sale because he has done this several times before and understands the things that can go wrong.
xeonmc 19 days ago [-]
Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.
He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
So he essentially functioned as a company’s bill-staples for its assets?
jbverschoor 18 days ago [-]
That was my immediate thought. Congrats to gitlab
18 days ago [-]
paulcole 19 days ago [-]
> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
So other than his relevant experience he has not relevant experience?
1propionyl 19 days ago [-]
> What started as a collaboration tool for developers is now the leading AI-powered DevSecOps platform.
Uh...
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
The photos look like an AI was given the prompt “tech ceo, headshot, for press release”.
Lammy 19 days ago [-]
50/50 chance to generate one looking directly at the camera, or one in ¾ view where one hand is holding a microphone with the other palm extended toward unseen audience.
griomnib 19 days ago [-]
“Hands or GTFO” is the new “PoC or GTFO”.
burnte 19 days ago [-]
They would have hired Bill Posters but he's being prosecuted.
danryan 18 days ago [-]
Bill Posters is innocent!
blastonico 19 days ago [-]
He's going to find out that being a Staples is harder than it looooks.
VulgarExigency 19 days ago [-]
He's the former CEO of Staples. He's going to have to change his name to Bill Gitlab.
lawik 19 days ago [-]
Already standard practice for fighters in Muay Thai. Don't see why CEOs shouldn't show their loyalty.
blackeyeblitzar 19 days ago [-]
He’s not the former CEO of Staples - where did you find that information?
CarVac 19 days ago [-]
It's a Tim Apple joke.
VulgarExigency 18 days ago [-]
I made it up
benatkin 18 days ago [-]
A very reliable source!
rolandthomas 17 days ago [-]
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throawayonthe 19 days ago [-]
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hipadev23 19 days ago [-]
What does Gitlab do. And why are they publicly traded?
---
I do think the change in leadership is probably more a continuation of Gitlab moving from a developer focused company to one focused on enterprise sales, so the product is probably going to continue to feel less interesting for me. They were pretty innovative in how open they were, so I hope at least some of that survives.
Indeed, he has cancer.
By taking a strategic role, investors are less worried because they know the CEO is still around.
But in this case it looks like it is legitimately a health reason. I hope he heals quickly.
He has cancer.
OP got to that.
I was saying the choice of a business-focused replacement with a track record of prepping companies for acquisition (vs say getting someone internal or with a more engineering track record) is a sign of changing direction, however.
One migrated from Github Enterprise Server explicitly as a cost saving measure. One migrated from Bitbucket Server because the writing seemed very much on the wall for Atlassian's self-hosted solution with the Jira pricing model change and a trial migration from Jira Server to Jira Cloud had gone so badly the whole thing was called off (though they did pay up for JIRA Data Center, JIRA was deemed less replaceable than Bitbucket apparently). The last went from Gitlab CE to Gitlab EE, so maybe there wasn't the hardest investigation of alternatives on that one, but they did at least claim they looked at Github Enterprise server as an alternative.
Now none of these companies used Exchange, Azure, Office, Teams, etc. etc. so maybe there's a bunch more discounts and synergy if you're fully bought into the MS ecosystem
GitLab was the first code host to add more products (CI, security, ops, helpdesk, analytics, etc.) and create a whole suite, and GitHub followed. GitLab also built for the enterprise years before GitHub started to give appropriate love to the enterprise. Some people think that GitLab is a GitHub clone. Quite the opposite!
Even if you don't use GitLab yourself, you've been a huge beneficiary of the dev workflow GitLab envisioned and created, and of the competition they've given to Microsoft/GitHub. Competition in this space makes everything better.
Disclaimer: I've worked with Sid and his team in the past.
Few people realize how long it's been since GitLab was a simple clone -- there has been a ton of legitimate net new innovation, and that happened under Sid (and of course all the awesome people working at GitLab).
Another thing that's actually insanely under-discussed is how openly GitLab runs and how that's been a successful model for them. I'm not sure I know another open core company that has been so successful in the space of developers who bend over backwards to pay nothing and spend hours of their own time (read $$$$$) to host their own <X>.
IMO they are the only credible competitor to GitHub, and they're open core, huge open source orgs, small companies, and large companies trust them (rightfully so), and they've built this all while being incredibly open and to this day you can still self-host their core software (which is a force multiplier for software companies).
Without Gitlab, Github would've taken years, maybe even longer, to develop what it has become today. I don't think Gitea and its forks would exist.
Now if only Github would go the extra mile and copy another feature from Gitlab (IPv6 support)…
It is, by leagues.
Even something simple like running a step before clone/checkout is impossible with Gitlab CI, let alone any of the actual powerful stuff.
But really that’s emblematic of the whole thing, where some particular workflow is possible but extremely awkward and hacky. You feel like you’re fighting the system and wish you were just writing whatever it is as a few lines of groovy in a Jenkinsfile.
There’s a middle ground between overly flexible and very constrained, and I think GitHub actions nails that.
Individual steps/actions are reusable components with clear interfaces, which is tied together by a simple workflow engine. This decoupling is great, and allows independent evolution.
As a point to this: GitHub actions doesn’t even offer git clone functionality: it doesn’t care about it. Everyone uses the core “GitHub/checkout” action, but there is nothing special about it.
The same for caching - the workflow/steps engine doesn’t give two shits about that. The end result of this decoupling is things like sccache and docker can offer native integrations with the cache system, because it’s a separate thing.
However, I've typically dealt with builds that have a very heavy dependency load (10-20GB) where it isn't desirable to install everything every time— I'd rather have an intermediate "deps" container that the build can start from. But I don't want to have to manually lifecycle that container; if I have a manifest of what's in my apt repo vs the current container, it should just know automatically when a container rebuild is required.
- 2021, Bill becomes CEO of NewRelic. 2023, NewRelic was acquired.
I'm seeing a pattern here.
> New Relic to be Acquired by Francisco Partners and TPG for $6.5 Billion
Sounds like he is good salesman, the numbers are quite good.
I also bought some stock a while back because I liked the product -- praise Jah if they all make out like bandits if it sells, I just hope the new owner doesn't let the product shit the bed.
If the other commenters are correct that the new CEO has a track record of pursuing private equity type acquisitions, then I fear GitLab CI is destined to become the next Travis CI.
* Bad error handling. Ruby errors leak through. Although the underlying error is my user error, returning it to me as an underlying Ruby exception is really unhelpful. It basically shows that they didn't validate inputs at all. The input is trusted, so it's probably not a security issue, but it's a huge usability and developer experience issue.
* Config format is weird and deficient. Surprisingly difficult to programmatically generate. Can't generate new jobs into the current pipeline. Must generate child pipelines. See above for the load amplification issue therein.
GitHub actions still aren’t k8s native, you actually have to install docker on your “runners” like it’s the year 2010. Pitiful.
I get the point about it not being ideal for self-hosted runners, not having ephemeral storage etc. But I disagree that the hosted GitHub Actions runners don't provide a good experience. If your build needs it - e.g. you're building something to deploy to your K8s cluster, use your Dockerfile and build in Docker. If you just want to compile some code, what's the point?
He is the guy responsible for the absolute train wreck that was the Azure portal v2 (post silver light) and v3 (Ibiza). He lied to Scott Guthrie, buried efforts to benchmark or in any way measure CSAT or usability, and stabbed many many people in the back.
Dude was also borderline incompetent.
His partner and buddy in the whole fraud was Jonah Sterling who managed to continue to get promoted and is one of the top design leaders at Microsoft despite having zero UX/UI/Interaction skills or knowledge and costing Microsoft years of wasted effort and ruining many design careers by overpromoting his directs to boost his own career trajectory.
After working with so many Microsoft execs who were either astoundingly incompetent or downright malicious people - it saddens me every time I see another one get named to a csuite of another company.
Oh, that description explains why the core pipeline authoring and capabilities have made almost no progress in the last few years. I actually thought gitlab still branded itself as a "classic" dev ops tool.
Ironically I was very open to paying for a service, but the “AI AI AI!” lost them at least one sale.
There was a short break after the first talk concluded during which about a third of the attendees left, myself included.
When my company was acquired by $MegaCorp, I noted one of vendors was like "trusted by $MegaCorp" because yes technically, they got a check from $MegaCorp but $MegaCorp was not interested in becoming further customer.
Ironically, the JetBrains autocomplete is better than their DUO plugin - JetBrains is faster and the GitLab plugin causes my IDE to completely lock up at least once a day.
“GitHub with a worse UI except GitHub’s has been getting worse for years so now they’re both similarly bad so never mind”
“Worse gitea but with more features so sometimes it’s better”
I love that it implies there is a more comprehensive DevSecOps platform that isn't AI-powered.
Can't believe they'd put "AI-powered" there when it can't even be used to find exact word matches.
After the pricing change, you had to start paying immediately (from the 6th user onwards or something), which made it a nonstarter because no company would start immediately paying for a Github replacement they didn't even know they wanted.
Together with Github being priced very cheaply, plus having free private repos, plus having the entire OSS world on it (for my OSS projects), I switched to it and never looked back.
I was a huge gitlab fan and would not have thought much of anything else, but the pricing made that impossible. The product has also suffered greatly as a result of the years of poor decision making at the top. It's one of the most unfortunate outcomes I can recall.
They still don't make a profit. So much more a "try to become profitable in a changing financial landscape that will give us much less runway to do so" than "short-term profit grab"
For him, it may be bad, or it may be just realizing either outcome, time is short.
Also, as far as I can, the security centre wouldn't let you download a .csv of current security issues in the repo - the UI lets you do a bunch of filtering, but the .csv always gives you everything, including issues that you've closed.
We gave up on that and decided to use another tool.
My gripe with GL is that all features are like this now. There is no invest into the basic building blocks, just yapping for the next trend. Most customers for GL use it on premise because they want to use it on prem. I would focus on Features that benefit that crowd, but hey I am just an developing not a gilded c suite.
Or replacing "For example, If you're charging for API requests" to "For example, If you're charging for LLama AI Model API requests".
Heck, I had to review a doc change at work that was pretty stupid. Like one thing we offer is an S3-compatible endpoint. But someone thought we should clarify that you can upload AI models there too and all our docs should include an "AI developer" section for how to upload a blob that also happen to be a model or a lora or whatever.
Because apparently Minio is for AI these days: https://min.io/
When the AI craze stated, so many people in my company came to me asking “if we can run AI workload”? another thing we offer is fairly generic compute meant for your average web applications or micro service etc. Initially I said “I don’t think so. We don’t have GPUs nor do we have any ability to express hardware requirements beyond CPU and Memory. We’ll need to do some work to include GPU into that”.
Then hilariously I learned that you don’t need GPUs or ASICs to be able to run “AI workloads”. If your compute allows you to call OpenAI rest APIs, then you’re also “AI Ready”.
or.. something.
Edit: I did not see before that Sid had cancer. I send him wishes for a good recovery!
On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.
Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.
He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.
FWIW, I found them easier to deal wit than github, so will hang tight to see how this plays out.
Nothing they’ve done since they were created has ever moved them in a more open source friendly direction, and they’ve broken a ton of promises both implicit and explicit along the way.
GitHub OTOH has only become more open source friendly (minus the AI stuff, but I suspect Gitlab is no better on that front).
In general, Github still feels like it's built for hobby coders (focusing on simplicity instead of configurability - which doesn't have to be a bad thing) while Gitlab feels like it's built for professional teams from the ground up.
I have never used Github Actions. Can you explain or give some examples what doesn't make sense?
To reuse code, Gitlab CI has simple template files which you can import into your toplevel .gitlab-ci.yml, and you have an inheritance system to derive new jobs from other jobs. That's a very simple and powerful system.
Code reuse in Github works with above mentioned 'actions' where each action seems to be a whole repository of stuff instead of a single file like in Gitlab CI.
Gitlab CI seems to be designed by people who know what they do and what their users need, while Github Actions seems to be designed by architecture astronauts, and has only afterwards and reluctantly been hammered into a shape where it does the things most users expect.
Gitlab CI actually seems like it was made for CI in the first place.
Protected branches and associated secrets. Much cleaner construct on gitlab.
GitHub actions defacto seems to be tracing yaml to compiled JavaScript to hopefully that right source to shell commands.
Gitlab seems to be yaml to shell commands.
Nested projects. Nice midspot between monorepo and access control management.
API. I may be out of date on it but I recall the gitlab apis as pretty sensible. The github apis for administration has a very odd rest/graphql split.
It can also render the complete pipeline config (making it easy to run and debug the problematic parts locally just by copying the relevant parts, even if they're hidden in and include somewhere).
Compare the gitlab UI with phabricator for example. The workflows are mostly a strange mixture of whatever github made up on the back of a napkin and Stakeholder-consultant slop.
Gitlab is open core, (not great but better than nothing) while github is zero open source.
One talks about open source because it's the de facto home of open source. The other is actually open source.
Could you elaborate if you can?
The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it.
Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.)
It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.
For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features. Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out below to actually migrate all the existing data out of GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the priority list.
If you made an offer to buy it for ~$15B right now, the board would basically have to approve the sale.
Mid sized newer companies likes Hashicorp or datadog or vercel who target developers as customers .
Gitlab gives access to a large audience of developers to cross sell most dev tools so all these orgs can get a lot of returns paying more than the standalone value of gitlab itself.
The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave
HashiCorp might not be the best fit anymore. Last year, they switched to a license that isn't open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306
In my mind just like LinkedIn , GitHub and Microsoft are every distinct entities with a lot of differences on how they work , Hashicorp and IBM parent are different and will remain so. Integrating into Hashicorp for Gitlab would be very different than integrating into IBM core with different values for both businesses .
GitLab supports storing the Terraform state and includes Terraform templates however they are moving to OpenTofu in 18.x [2]
1. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/hashicorp_vault.html 2. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/deprecations.html
If an acquisition has to make sense there should be a clear path to monetize it, for IBM core or its HashiCorp unit or any other buyer that will not just be through some light integrations alone, they can achieved with partnerships after all you don't need to buy the organization for it.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/google-backed-software...
Given New Relic is a direct competitor, Bill Staples' background makes even more sense.
I seriously don't understand the deals being made in tech. Most of the makes no sense, not even retrospectively. I get Microsoft buying Github, that was a part of their open source strategy and they've always put a high value on developers.
I wouldn't buy them for that myself, but Gitlab made $200 million in revenue in Q3 2024 [1]. So $800 million a year in revenue.
I've seen worse purchases.
[1] https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2024/GitLab-Reports-...
There might be some potential for Gitlab complement your other business, in which case you may not see the lack of profit as that big of an issue. The problem is that if you can't make those $8billions back in future profit, then you're going to start making changes to the Gitlab offerings until they do become profitable.
That might be what the new CEO is suppose to do, pump up those numbers, and make it look like a sane investment.
The main question is probably the price.
I would be excited if IBM acquired them and put them under the red hat umbrella, because as history has shown, it may mean that gitlab ends up becoming much more open. They may open up the entire product instead of doing the open core model.
AWS shut down their service, if AWS can "easily" integrate with Gitlab, I see a lot of potential on the deployment side to increase AWS revenue.
Google isn't know for its hands-off approach nor long term view for service growths. Gitlab is essential to balance Github's impact, I'd hate it to go in the graveyard.
Horrific outcomes: Atlassian, Oracle, or IBM buys it.
Great outcomes: Google, Amazon, or JetBrains ($7B private valuation) buys it.
I think it would make more sense for a number of companies to invest in Gitlab, to ensure that there is a 3rd. party tool available, as to not "force" users into the hands of Github and Microsoft.
That's probably the best case, Google, Amazon, IBM, JetBrains and a few others create a company, with themselves on the board, and tasks that company with buying and running Gitlab. Having Google alone buy it and you may as well just migrate now pending the inevitable disinterest and shutdown. So I guess that I disagree, Gitlab makes more sense as an independent company, that it does as part of companies that already had failed competing products.
My guess is the ever popular MicroFocus (Now OpenText) who will buy everything that it on the edge of popularity.
I don’t see GitLab replacing BitBucket.
But GitLab price annually for the same amount of users that we have for Bamboo and BitBucket is higher in licensing fees. We have to do things self hosted because of regulatory and compliance reasons.
There is probably a business case to be made for the inefficiency that we see with Bamboo.
BitBucket DC is pretty solid and never goes down. It integrates well with all the other Atlassian products like Jira or Confluence. Our instance is also highly available and fault tolerant.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/how-to-migrate-your-aws-...
YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind, Firebase, HTC (Pixel)
Don't discount Google's M&A game.
Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas’s is to Boeing.
It's a lot easier/more common for Google to kill internal projects and small acquisitions.
A $16B write-down is far less likely, especially when many Googlers internally realize how much a threat Microsoft is with GitHub + VS Code.
As a former CentOS user, I politely disagree with this.
Good point, red hat is far from perfect. The way they handled cent was incredibly disappointing.
New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.
Then there are things like having roadmaps for the future to make you look attractive.
Then there are vulture things to make your numbers look good which can range from doing neglected cleanups of actually unnecessary costs to cutting costs in ways that really suck for customers and employees.
I think a lot of people would say this is not true. I worked with Bill a little at Microsoft, where he ran an x,000-person engineering org, and my experience was that he was a competent, detail-oriented, product-focused leader. You might disagree but, in any event, running an x,000-person org in a large tech company does qualify you for CEO positions, at least in the eyes of people who make those decisions.
This isn’t secondhand either. I witnessed him multiple times telling reports to bury findings, stop research that made the product look bad, and actively prevent anyone from going over his head to higher leadership.
Not sure how much more relevant you can get....
So other than his relevant experience he has not relevant experience?
Uh...
The team that runs this Hacker News comment site also invests in startups from time to time. GitLab did pretty well.
:-)