(I promise this will turn out favorable for gitlab)<p>When gitlab first came out, I found the amount of shameful copying of github distasteful. I thought, man these guys have not done an ounce of anything original, so what's the point in even encouraging this kind of slimyness?<p>But then Github stagnated, and stagnated some more. And gitlab went past the initial copying and started innovating and adding more features.<p>And now with their CI/CD, and fully integrated pipeline, they seem to be way, way ahead of Github, whereas Github seems to have focused more on handling the infrastructure needed for their sheer level of scale.<p>In Github's case, I bet they felt their hands were tied because they had a whole ecosystem around them (like all the CI/CD companies that tightly integrate). Gitlab didn't have that issue, and was free to integrate to their heart's content.<p>To be honest, the only reason I moved back to Github after trying Gitlab a couple years ago was the performance. But again, Gitlab seems to be the little engine that keeps chugging. They have a certain hunger about them to improve, that they're constantly and relentlessly chipping away at the software's flaws. And sytse is always active in all these threads armed with great answers to pretty much every single criticism leveled at them.<p>So at least for now, they seem to be a lot more hungry than Github, so kudos to them.<p>Once all this hubbub dies down, I may move all my repos to Gitlab, but mostly for the CI/CD pipeline.<p>Github has totally earned their success, but they did seem to be stagnating for a while there.
One downside to this announcement is that this may become an excuse to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.<p>We (Debian) use Gitlab (salsa.debian.org) but we wouldn't switch to the free Gold/Ultimate version because we don't want our infrastructure to run on proprietary software.<p>It might be that the majority of free software projects accept to use the free subscription and therefore lower the pressure to add new features to Gitlab CE.
> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects.<p>Okay that sounds good though I can't figure out what "Gold" is as their pricing page only mentions "Core" / "Starter" / "Premium" / "Ultimate": <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/pricing</a><p><i>EDIT</i>: Nevermind ... the metallic plans are for the hosted SaaS offering which doesn't show up by default on the pricing page with JS disabled.<p>> Open source projects: any project that uses a standard open source licence and is non-commercial.<p>I get the idea that GitLab wants to offer something to FOSS projects but restricting things to "Non-commerical" is both vague and limiting. Would Spring qualify? It's open source but backed by a commercial entity. How about Redis? Open source with multiple companies offering hosted variants. What about MySQL? It <i>is</i> GPL ... but you know Oracle...<p>Also unless GitLab is going by the Queen's English "licence" is spelled wrong (should be an "s").<p>> Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. However, you can buy support for 95% off, at $4.95 per user per month. To purchase support, contact sales.<p>So support is usually $100/user/month? Are there any takers at that price or is that the usual high ball so that you can offer a discount to the procurement department?
I think it is great that they are offering is, but it's a shame that students/lecturers/researchers cannot apply individually. GitHub and others work around the administrative load by checking the e-mail address against educational domains.
"It has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we've seen a 7x increase in orders." That's quite an impact!
While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing...<p>Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?<p>Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git, providing Git infrastructure for all those projects?<p>It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure into the hands of <i></i>any<i></i> commercial entity.
Can I self host gitlab gold with my 20 opensource projects but with 2 non-opensource because these are my experiments with stuff I dont want to show and get indexed by search engines?<p>@sytse: congratulations on that move :)
While I enjoy my free gitlab.com account, I would prefer to use a version of Gitlab that is 100% open-source. This in order to not feel trapped the day they are bought by a bigger actor. I hope they will allow such an option.
Maybe they should change their Twitter bio. It leads with "GitLab is open source software" but if they move many of the users of the Community Edition to GitLab Ultimate, they will stop feeling the pain points of the Community Edition and too many core features will be Enterprise-only, and the Community Edition will fall into disuse.
I like this. I just don't know if it's a smart idea. Some threads since the announcement have complained about the performance of Gitlab (in varying ways, from website to CI). Is providing free access to an overloaded system really the best course? Will this negativity impact paying customers? This is the right thing to do, but preparation might have been a good first step.
Awesome response. I signed up years ago because they do unlimited free private repos, though I wondered how they could afford to give so much away for free. While I can't find the exact statement now, I was affected somewhat by their dedication to always offering unlimited free repositories, believing that such access was along the lines of a "digital right". Obviously there's strategy to all of this, but following them all this time it's nice to believe that perhaps the top of the organization still believe in that goal too.
Without sounding too negative, in its current state I wouldn't even want to use GitLab for free. I applaud them for this move, but I simply don't understand how a company that employs that many people and that redesigsn its entire software the 3rd? 4th? time still has a complete usability mess at its hands.