He's right that their value-add is the fully integrated devops cycle. That's what's been appealing to us with Gitlab (even though it is sometimes not as polished as other offerings). Having one SaaS subscription for most of your dev process needs as a startup is nice.
I can't help but wonder if they have checked out MS devops they have a really robust set of tools from end to end of a project, it's free fo up to 5 users, free private repos, etc.
And considering they purchased github, I'm starting to wonder if they did it just to get a name that have more acceptance and will be migrating git hub to this same model and infrastructure but with a different face.
> At the time, I was very disappointed to learn that BitBucket.org already offered the same. GitLab took off despite that and GitLab.com recently surpassed 10 million projects.
Is it just me, or does this sentence not make sense? I don't know why this is disappointing to him, or why he would just be learning this now.
My memory is pretty hazy, but I believe GitLab began as a simple Git hosting program for people to be able to run on their own servers, and it started without serious intent to build a money-making product. BitBucket Server didn't exist yet (and even today, it's just Atlassian Stash renamed, IIRC.)
When they went to launch GitLab.com, they probably did more product research at that point, and that's probably where the disappointment came in.
I think GitLab's approach is pretty cool, and software toward developers really ought to be developed in this manner: start with the problem, then work on the product. No point in trying to build a product for a problem you can't solve. GitLab today is certainly a better product for being heavily oriented around solving developer's problems; for example, having GitLab CI built-in and even usable for free even on private repositories on GitLab.com is incredible, and it's one of those things that are going to continue to be enticing as GitHub increases the competition.
I can't imagine it will be long before Azure DevOps is integrated in some way to GitHub. They don't even have to introduce it as such...just a thinly veiled mask for job running. Or even Azure Functions doing the work. MS has the advantages with having Azure behind the scenes so it will be interesting to see what they "give" it.
Bitbucket was originally focused on Mercurial. At the time I think Google Code or whatever they called their Mercurial/SVN hosting was an option too. There was also Gitorious, etc. At that time even Bazaar was still being used by some prominent projects.
He’s talking about when they were first getting started. Their differentiator was going to be free private repositories, and he was disappointed to find out that someone else did it first.
I learned this at the time, years ago. And I was disappointed because I thought offering free private repos would be a unique differentiator in the market.
GitLab is awesome. There are a lot of features I use like the built in time tracking. Also, I'm not very interested in using GitHub since it was acquired by Microsoft since they have a littered history of abuse and vendor lock-in. I'm not sure how they will try to retrofit EEE onto Git, but I won't be surprised when they somehow do.
I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s.
As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows. They are also apparently going to support their VFS for Git protocol on GitHub, but VFS for Git is open source and supports Windows and Mac (and apparently, will support Linux.) And they claim Git is now the source control for Windows, which is impressive if true. By all accounts, Microsoft has been supporting Git in some form for several years and appears to have only increased their stake.
I still think GitLab is awesome, though. There's a whole ton of things GitLab does that GitHub does not. I will probably continue to use both, myself.
> I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s.
I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.)
> As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows
That's the first and second E's in EEE. Wait for the extinguish portion of their plan.
I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
>I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.)
I do not know what their justification is for those defaults. They could, for all I know, have good reasoning, like legacy support. It's possible, though less likely, that they simply didn't put much thought into it.
I do know that the xlsx format is standardized. I've not used it myself, but I've heard it's not unreasonable (whereas docx is apparently a bit less reasonable.) And I mean, from my experience I've not had trouble opening Excel spreadsheets in LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If they broke in any way, I failed to notice.
In any case it sounds like minor greivances and a pretty darn far cry from 90s Microsoft.
>I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
Well this is incorrect. I use GitHub but I'm not doubling down. I don't use Windows except in VMs, I find it to be downright vexatious and even the new Windows 10 for Workstations is still incredibly annoying (yep, still getting Cortana SPAM by default.) I also find it suspicious when Edge is magically the default browser or my file associations to IrfanView keep getting reset to Windows Photo Viewer due to "corrupt file associations," yet those same file associations work fine if I uninstall Windows Photo Viewer.
Those things are really super annoying. However, even some of the more egregious behaviors hit me as unlikely to be intentional. I am frustrated at an upsettingly similar rate by open source software and it only recently occurred to me that I would almost never attribute this to underhanded tactics.
I still prefer my open source software, but I do think Microsoft is different. Time will tell.
Open a csv file in Excel, edit it and save (the latter is locale dependent). The result is horrible. I maintain a tool which offers csv import and export of data and we have regularly bug reports from users when they use excel to use it (Excel opens csv files by default on Windows). I did not find a way to tell Excel to not alter the meta-structure (such as replacing commas with semicolons), not to start about escaping.
Excel outputs CSVs in Excel dialect rather than RFC 4180. Unfortunate as it is, it's probably only sane to do that. A lot of stuff has probably relied on it for decades. Python 3, for example, defaults to excel dialect in it's CSV library. Apache Commons CSV supports Excel dialect. I imagine there's all kinds of crap relying on this by now.
The fact that it doesn't have an option to output in RFC 4180 is unideal, but I can certainly see why. For almost their entire userbase, it would be the wrong option. I don't think they really want more code paths to maintain either. Seems logical enough.
Of course it's relatively easy to support XLS/XLSX and it should be relatively easy to automatically detect what dialect of CSV you're taking in. So if your goal is happier customers, then you have options. It is what it is.
I don't think this is a JScript type situation here. The world mostly standardized on Excel style CSV and a different standard was blessed by IETF. But much like HTML5 vs XHTML, sometimes standards should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. RFC 4180 would've been more useful had it followed Excel dialect. Instead I think it leaves Microsoft in a tough place and their decision has been to not change it in line with how they normally treat backwards compatibility.
Far from a staunch fan of Microsoft myself, but I do think it's important to stay rational and have some reasonable skepticism.
I understand legacy. The only wish I have is to tell Excel to honour the RFC (it's not that Excel isn't developed any longer). Just a checkbox (or whatever).
I am using the Apache CSV library to parse csv. Content coming from Excel is still ... difficult. And Apache is fine with handling RFC 4180 compliant content.
If the "new" Microsoft is really opening up to Open Source, it'd be nice if they honoured existing standards at least with products which are still under development. All I am asking for is one more entry in the "Save As..." dialogs drop down box. It can't be that hard...
> I think it's time to finally give up this mindset. Past misgivings be damned, Microsoft of today really doesn't look much like Microsoft of the 90s.
On the contrary, I don't see them as having changed at all. The old tactics are still in play; they've just gotten better at convincing the gullible that they are now on their side.
After the Windows 10 fiasco as well, I'm done with the company.
Boycotting all non-FLOSS products by Google, Apple, Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft isn't a bad thing to do. I'm not there yet (Gmail, Facebook, occasionally something owned by Google like YouTube), but the goal is to eventually get there :P
Your snarky dismissal aside, I'm far from affluent, I'm on £45k a year in the north-west (Liverpool, HIGHLY deprived area) of the UK. I'd wager, without even meeting you, that you are far better off than I am.
I was raised on a UK council estate and none of my family had ever been to university before I did (and it was a former polytechnic). I'm far from making the kind of money the rest of you guys on HN do. Despite that, I can still justify the few £'s a month (£18.50 in total) I actually spend on service provided by non-shitty companies.
Try addressing what I said instead of taking this immature attitude. Or just admit that cost has nothing to do with why you stick with and defend abusive companies.
No, £35k in the south, where cost of living is a fair bit higher.
£45k pre-tax is top 15% household income nationally...
My point is that I can't afford to pick and choose companies I work for to avoid big tech. I work in .NET, but I have no idea how I'd find a company that doesn't use Office365 these days.
It's not personal usage that funds these companies, it's enterprise usage. Working with (and hence endorsing and funding) software that abusive companies makes is the problem, not the tiny amounts individuals spend.
The only way I know to avoid that is to be self-employed, or own a company yourself.
I'm starting to believe that Gitlab actually has marketing team dedicated to HN. Everytime there is a Gitlab HN post you would find random unrelated comments on why they prefer Gitlab over Github.
More likely just fan-boys that like competitions David vs Goliath. However, GitLab is the only project here that constantly receives such noticeable treatment. It is a good marketing team indeed!
I wouldn't call us fanboys. I would call us devotees. Like firefox followers. We are not many, but we are devoted, and we will tell you about it, and the reasons we believe them to be superior to other products. :D
Hi, Community Advocate [1] at GitLab here. I am part of the team which takes care of our community and that includes the communication with users.
Briefly our (my team's) goal is to respond to every question about GitLab asked online and to stay transparent [2] about evrerything.
This helps us to create better documentation and processes as well as it's easier to provide feedback into GitLab.
Regarding the user feedback and preferences on HN, everyone's comment is welcome and we really appreciate the words from the competitor's side.
It's really interesting that many people at GitLab joins the HN threads and you probably noticed our CEO's activity as well as many other GitLabbers.
I think you are correct. Gitlab strongly caters to the HN community, even at the beginning of the post from the CEO there is even a reference to a hacker news comment.
Nothing wrong with that of course though, just interesting to observe that connection.
This feels like a race to the bottom. Gitlab was so bold to launch unlimited free private repos. Feels like github made a weak move in response to market loss. It will be interesting to see what happens when Google or Amazon start promoting their git products.
I like how GitHub has search on their front page while GitLab has some marketing page instead. Is it possible to search Gitlab without logging in?
I used to host Gitlab for more private repos for many years but lately I have switched to Gogs because it is much simpler to maintain it and it has less bloat (and features).
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 86.5 ms ] thread> Free for small teams under 5 and priced to scale with Standard ($2/user/mo) or Premium ($5/user/mo) plans.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/product
And considering they purchased github, I'm starting to wonder if they did it just to get a name that have more acceptance and will be migrating git hub to this same model and infrastructure but with a different face.
Is it just me, or does this sentence not make sense? I don't know why this is disappointing to him, or why he would just be learning this now.
When they went to launch GitLab.com, they probably did more product research at that point, and that's probably where the disappointment came in.
I think GitLab's approach is pretty cool, and software toward developers really ought to be developed in this manner: start with the problem, then work on the product. No point in trying to build a product for a problem you can't solve. GitLab today is certainly a better product for being heavily oriented around solving developer's problems; for example, having GitLab CI built-in and even usable for free even on private repositories on GitLab.com is incredible, and it's one of those things that are going to continue to be enticing as GitHub increases the competition.
As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows. They are also apparently going to support their VFS for Git protocol on GitHub, but VFS for Git is open source and supports Windows and Mac (and apparently, will support Linux.) And they claim Git is now the source control for Windows, which is impressive if true. By all accounts, Microsoft has been supporting Git in some form for several years and appears to have only increased their stake.
I still think GitLab is awesome, though. There's a whole ton of things GitLab does that GitHub does not. I will probably continue to use both, myself.
I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.)
> As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows
That's the first and second E's in EEE. Wait for the extinguish portion of their plan.
I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
I do not know what their justification is for those defaults. They could, for all I know, have good reasoning, like legacy support. It's possible, though less likely, that they simply didn't put much thought into it.
I do know that the xlsx format is standardized. I've not used it myself, but I've heard it's not unreasonable (whereas docx is apparently a bit less reasonable.) And I mean, from my experience I've not had trouble opening Excel spreadsheets in LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If they broke in any way, I failed to notice.
In any case it sounds like minor greivances and a pretty darn far cry from 90s Microsoft.
>I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
Well this is incorrect. I use GitHub but I'm not doubling down. I don't use Windows except in VMs, I find it to be downright vexatious and even the new Windows 10 for Workstations is still incredibly annoying (yep, still getting Cortana SPAM by default.) I also find it suspicious when Edge is magically the default browser or my file associations to IrfanView keep getting reset to Windows Photo Viewer due to "corrupt file associations," yet those same file associations work fine if I uninstall Windows Photo Viewer.
Those things are really super annoying. However, even some of the more egregious behaviors hit me as unlikely to be intentional. I am frustrated at an upsettingly similar rate by open source software and it only recently occurred to me that I would almost never attribute this to underhanded tactics.
I still prefer my open source software, but I do think Microsoft is different. Time will tell.
There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it.
That RFC is from 2005. Excel appeared in 1987.
Excel outputs CSVs in Excel dialect rather than RFC 4180. Unfortunate as it is, it's probably only sane to do that. A lot of stuff has probably relied on it for decades. Python 3, for example, defaults to excel dialect in it's CSV library. Apache Commons CSV supports Excel dialect. I imagine there's all kinds of crap relying on this by now.
The fact that it doesn't have an option to output in RFC 4180 is unideal, but I can certainly see why. For almost their entire userbase, it would be the wrong option. I don't think they really want more code paths to maintain either. Seems logical enough.
Of course it's relatively easy to support XLS/XLSX and it should be relatively easy to automatically detect what dialect of CSV you're taking in. So if your goal is happier customers, then you have options. It is what it is.
I don't think this is a JScript type situation here. The world mostly standardized on Excel style CSV and a different standard was blessed by IETF. But much like HTML5 vs XHTML, sometimes standards should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. RFC 4180 would've been more useful had it followed Excel dialect. Instead I think it leaves Microsoft in a tough place and their decision has been to not change it in line with how they normally treat backwards compatibility.
Far from a staunch fan of Microsoft myself, but I do think it's important to stay rational and have some reasonable skepticism.
I am using the Apache CSV library to parse csv. Content coming from Excel is still ... difficult. And Apache is fine with handling RFC 4180 compliant content.
If the "new" Microsoft is really opening up to Open Source, it'd be nice if they honoured existing standards at least with products which are still under development. All I am asking for is one more entry in the "Save As..." dialogs drop down box. It can't be that hard...
On the contrary, I don't see them as having changed at all. The old tactics are still in play; they've just gotten better at convincing the gullible that they are now on their side.
After the Windows 10 fiasco as well, I'm done with the company.
Or you could made a measured decision on a product by product basis.
As I'm sure you do with all the other big tech companies which have massively betrayed us.
Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle (for starters).
Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
I was raised on a UK council estate and none of my family had ever been to university before I did (and it was a former polytechnic). I'm far from making the kind of money the rest of you guys on HN do. Despite that, I can still justify the few £'s a month (£18.50 in total) I actually spend on service provided by non-shitty companies.
Try addressing what I said instead of taking this immature attitude. Or just admit that cost has nothing to do with why you stick with and defend abusive companies.
£45k pre-tax is top 15% household income nationally...
My point is that I can't afford to pick and choose companies I work for to avoid big tech. I work in .NET, but I have no idea how I'd find a company that doesn't use Office365 these days.
It's not personal usage that funds these companies, it's enterprise usage. Working with (and hence endorsing and funding) software that abusive companies makes is the problem, not the tiny amounts individuals spend.
The only way I know to avoid that is to be self-employed, or own a company yourself.
Briefly our (my team's) goal is to respond to every question about GitLab asked online and to stay transparent [2] about evrerything. This helps us to create better documentation and processes as well as it's easier to provide feedback into GitLab.
Regarding the user feedback and preferences on HN, everyone's comment is welcome and we really appreciate the words from the competitor's side.
It's really interesting that many people at GitLab joins the HN threads and you probably noticed our CEO's activity as well as many other GitLabbers.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/marketing/community-ad... [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency
Nothing wrong with that of course though, just interesting to observe that connection.