Gitlab is not just git hosting, they want to own the full developing cycle. they already got ci pipelines, easy ways to deploy on kubernates, and much more and its feature are growing at a fast. You cannnot replicate every gitlab feature with 10M, and you still have to fight the network effect.
For years Gitlab had a better offer then Github, and yet github was always more popular due to the network effect.
That's not how it works.
Open source makes it trivial for the nerds inside a company to deploy. Soon, they start taking advantage of various APIs and integrations. They'll have scripts written in Bash, Perl, Python, Ruby and what not talking to various API endpoints, communicating with other systems using JSON, XML, etc. Every single bot or integration like that is one more "tentacle".
Without signing a contract or even having the board or upper management discuss it, the organization is now entrenched with this piece of software. Comes along a new regulation for your industry; GPDR, SOX, HIPAA, etc. It doesn't matter. What do you do? Fortunately, the provider of your "open source" (or rather: open core) solution offers features supporting your use case. You just have to upgrade from the MIT-licensed core, community edition to the enterprise edition, for $xx,xxx per year.
Nobody cares about that. Sales and value is what matters in the real-world. Gitlab has sales from customers who have proven they value the product. That's where the valuation comes from.
It doesn't matter if you can clone it exactly tomorrow. Go ahead and do so. It won't give you the same valuation and it won't hurt theirs because that's not how it works.
Right. And next you’re going to tell me that the majority of their users don’t just download the software and deploy it without paying.
Gitlab as a company is about a precarious as Docker as a company. Most of its users are using it for free, and the few that are paying would happily pay anyone else who provided support for the same software. It’s a commodity.
All freemium business models have a large free usage tier. This is completely unsurprising.
But yes, many people also pay Gitlab for enterprise features (which are not open-source), hosting, support, and more. If they would pay anyone else then why aren't they using Github? If they just wanted git itself then why aren't they using the numerous lightweight alternatives?
Business isn't as simple as replicating a product, it's about selling value, and Gitlab has a unique solution that covers the entire software lifecycle. I'm sure you know all this but yet you've made numerous posts disparaging this company. Why, exactly?
I love how the gitlab fanboys try to have it both ways.
When arguing why it’s better than alternatives, the talking point is that “it’s open-source!” But when it’s (rightfully) pointed out that this doesn’t leave much of a defensive moat, the open-source philosophy gets thrown under the bus.
Yes, yes...it’s “open core”. That just means that it’s 10% more difficult to clone and replicate the business. Mark my words: someday, Gitlab will do something to piss off the “community”, and this will quickly happen.
Gitea is already a decent competitor, valued at $0.
What gives a company like this value are the contracts and the technical lock-ins making sure you can milk a relatively small group of captive, high-value users for many years. There are many companies using Gitlab.
Building a product is the easy part. Building the user base is what makes an evaluation. Just the same as anyone can start a fast food chain but if no buys any food in there the chain isn’t worth squat.
When our firm moved to git, Github and Gitlab were chosen as options and since gitlab gave us a better offer, we took it. However, the firm also uses Jira and now we are getting a better offer with Jira, Confluence and bitbucket. Eventhough Gitlab is loved by our team, It looks like Bitbucket will be the future for us. So you should not underestimate the market presence of a company.
It is a mistake to let the issue tracker (Jira) drive tool selection instead of the developer tools (configuration management, continuous integration). Be cautious of the switch if your company is switching for that reason.
The problem is that we are a team of 12 use the versioning, while more than 500 people of various teams use Jira and Atlassian toolset ( Whose jobs dont require versioning, as we create tools that hide/simplify the process for them).
Because Atlassian manages to extract boatloads of enterprise money for a product portfolio that can be best described as an inconsistent, unintegrated mess.
Everything they have was bought together and crudely integrated, with each product having totally different ways of using and administrating them. Not to mention that core features (e.g. "merging" duplicate user accounts, SAML login) are paid-for plugins of varying quality. Feature suggestions for the products end up in multi-year-old tickets that one has no way to influence.
But still, enterprises are buying up that crap because the alternatives to JIRA and Confluence plainly suck even more. The only thing that has real competition is Bitbucket, with Gitlab and Github as more than viable alternatives.
Atlassian have very successfully aligned themselves with the managerial layer that like to think their organisations are "agile", or believe that buying some software suite will somehow bring that about, rather than simply codify and entrench their existing faulty workflows and add new processes to bureaucratize.
Agile equals a bunch of complicated "workflows" in Jira. This is a real thing that a non-small number of managers believe. Or if they don't believe it, they sure act like they do.
This came up on the Hadoop JIRA lately. Someone submitted an issue several years ago and the team is investigating it now and he was trying to figure out how to get off the notification list. They ended up having to change the reporter. jfc jira's a mess.
Extracting money is what a business does. They managed to extract enough to get their valuation. It has nothing to do with how bad the product is, and shows why sales is far more important than tech when building a company.
