
Alphabet Backs GitLab's Quest to Surpass Microsoft's GitHub - bauta-steen
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-19/alphabet-backs-gitlab-s-quest-to-surpass-microsoft-s-github
======
Presquare
From "Laws of Tech: Commoditize Your Complement"
([https://www.gwern.net/Complement](https://www.gwern.net/Complement)):

> _Joel Spolsky in 2002 identified a major pattern in technology business &
> economics: the pattern of "commoditizing your complement"_

> _This pattern explains many otherwise odd or apparently self-sabotaging
> ventures by large tech companies into apparently irrelevant fields ..._

> _...they are pre-emptive attempts to commodify another company elsewhere in
> the stack, or defenses against it being done to them._

After having read this article, it's been interesting how a lot of these
investments have started making more sense. They often aren't primarily about
the product itself, rather they serve the function of minimizing any leverage
other companies could have over them.

As Github offers an access to a valuable resource for tech companies,
developers, Microsoft could use it to promote its products/services and to
attract talent. This isn't good for Google, so they are hoping to reduce
Microsoft's leverage.

In some sense this is obvious, but I hadn't consciously identified this as a
pattern before.

~~~
maxxxxx
I hope somebody will do this to Google's business so they have to do something
else than selling ads.

~~~
radiorental
That's why there is alphabet, labs etc. The business is trying to diversify.

~~~
pdimitar
Apologies if what I say is naive -- I don't follow Google announcements at all
-- but they don't seem to try and progress any field per se, except maybe deep
learning and only where it serves them (like one of their first successes was
to reduce their power usage on a ship full of servers I think?).

They are merging YouTube Gaming to YT itself (cited branding problems),
discontinuing Inbox next March... Add that to a long list of canceled
services. I am not saying they have to run a charity but they do seem very
heavy-handed in these situations.

And so far we have not seen them innovate anywhere for a while -- correct me
if I am wrong.

To me, it seems they entrench themselves even further in the business of using
personal data for profit -- one example could be the upcoming laptop OS
Fuchsia. Imagine how much more they will know about people if that takes off
on a massive scale.

~~~
manigandham
They do have lots of ancillary revenue streams, but when you're talking about
100s of billions from ads then they just get overshadowed completely. Very
hard to build an equivalently sized business in any other sector.

The major now seems to be on Google Cloud, but they have struggled there with
bad marketing, lack of sales and support talent, and strange priorities. Seems
to be growing now with the AI functionalities but there's a long road ahead.

------
hardwaresofton
Yeah, I don't want to live in a world where Google owns/buys out Gitlab, but I
sure am happy to hear Gitlab getting more and more recognition.

They've fully stepped out of the shadow of Github (for a long while, in my
mind), and it's nice to see people taking attention.

~~~
chii
> I don't want to live in a world where Google owns/buys out Gitlab

why not? If it means gitlab can have the resources to keep improving...

and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
> and given that it's open-source, there's no fear of any shutdowns.

Well, not entirely. The community aspect of GitHub would largely be lost if it
vanished overnight and was replaced by scattered competing clones, even if
they were running the exact same code.

~~~
cs02rm0
Yeah... if anyone remembers Google Wave, which was open sourced and pushed out
to Apache when Google decided to close it down. Eventually that didn't even
have enough momentum to live on under Apache.

Which might not meet some definitions of fear, but it's not the best outcome
for anyone who likes a product.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Not a bad comparison, but I think Google Wave was doomed from the start. As
they say, it 'filled a much needed gap'. It wasn't quite a forum, it wasn't
quite an IM chat system, it wasn't quite a wiki, and it had no clear
advantages.

~~~
cs02rm0
I sort of agree, but then I look at Slack's success and I'm left a little
baffled.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Not the only one. It's a proprietary IRC derivative, attached to an absurdly
bloated GUI.

Apparently this, uh, 'innovation', is worth around $3bn.

------
KaiserPro
Gitlab _could_ be a brilliant SaaS product. It has many more features than
github, Runner integration allows simple and easy building, instead of having
to bust out to circleCI.

As a self hosted product, it is difficult to be beaten.

but as a Saas product, its just horribly unreliable.

In the last two months it has improved, but there are still outages every two
weeks or so.
([https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus](https://twitter.com/gitlabstatus)) I'm
hoping that with this extra cash, they'll be hiring in some infrastructure
people (people who will look at this in horror:
[https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/11/proposed-server-
purchase...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/12/11/proposed-server-purchase-for-
gitlab-com/) ) who actually know how to make a stable platform using _proven
"boring"_ stuff, not sexy slow and supposedly HA stuff like Ceph and forcing
it to serve NFS.

~~~
dsumenkovic
Thanks for your comment, we really appreciate the feedback. Our team is
working hard on improving the availability and stability of the platform. Our
goal is currently to achieve 99.95% availability on GitLab.com.

According to Pingdom, over the last year our availability has been 99.81%,
although this includes the large (multi-hour) maintenance window on 11 August
2018 when we migrated GitLab.com from Microsoft Azure cloud to Google Cloud
Platform (GCP).

Since the migration, our availability has improved greatly (caveat: we
obviously have much less data than from Azure).

Using the data publicly available from Pingdom, here are some interesting
stats:

Mean-time between outages in Azure (September 2017 through August 11 2018):
1.3 days

Mean-time between outages in GCP (September 2017 through August 12 2018): 7.3
days (if you ignore some problems we experienced on the first day after the
migration, this rises to 12 days!)

Since, migrating to GCP, our overall availability, according to Pingdom, has
risen to 99.92%. Again, if you exclude the few hiccups that we experienced on
the Monday immediately following the migration, this rises to 99.97%.

There are multiple reasons for this improvement. We chose Google Cloud
Platform because we believe that they offer the most reliable cloud platform
for our workload, particularly as we move towards running GitLab.com in
Kubernetes. It is worth pointing out that we also used the migration as an
opportunity to improve our infrastructure, simplify some components and
otherwise make things more stable and more observable. Finally, we've also
been focusing on building the infrastructure team up, having hired many new
team members over the past few months. This means that the team has been
better able to balance the job of running GitLab.com with making it more
stable.

~~~
_salmon
That's all well and good, but by your own admission you're still having
outages nearly once a week on average

------
xte
In the past we have had few "code repos" from Savannah to Sf and few sites
like freshmeat to spread the news, the code, the idea. Of course we also have
had and have used usenet.

IMVHO today it's time to evalutare ZeroNet for project sites/blog and
something like IPFS (not much convinced by this project but...) for code and
repos to AVOID depend on someone else server's switching to relay only on us
all.

For me there is no difference in GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket etc, nor
between Google and Microsoft. In an era of diversity companies are not a
problem, in an oligopolistic era like today, in an era of proprietary
platforms instead of open standard companies are a problem and should be
avoided, especially if they are big, especially if they push mix of
proprietary and FOSS solution.

~~~
simias
I use github a lot but I'm not too worried about the vendor lock-in. Since git
is by nature distributed it's trivial to migrate the code elsewhere. The real
problem is migrating the issues (but there are solutions for that as well,
even if it's a bit more clunky) and the "social network" aspect but I don't
care much for that myself.

But you're right, maybe IPFS plus something like Fossil (including issues in
the VCS directly) could be a good solution to have a truly decentralized
"platform".

~~~
matt_the_bass
For me and my team, git is not the tie-in for github. PRs are. Those are the
proprietary parts of GitHubs value proposition. We use them all the time and
fine the review process pretty convenient. I haven’t tried gitlabs equivalent.
I’m sure we could use them but we’d need to adjust our workflow. So we’ll stay
at github until the cost of migrating is less than any pain points we find at
GitHub

~~~
tkxxx7
PRs seem to have the same functionality everywhere; I haven’t seen anything in
Github that I couldn’t do in Bitbucket or Gitlab.

~~~
dsumenkovic
PRs are related to MRs (Merge Requests), howver MRs have some additional
features. Here you can read more about it
[https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/gitlab-merge-request-
vs-...](https://about.gitlab.com/comparison/gitlab-merge-request-vs-github-
pull-request.html)

------
ssijak
Actually I trust Microsoft more with Github than I would trust Google. Never
imagined I would say this until few months ago. Also I just left free google
consumer services few days ago.

~~~
flyinglizard
Microsoft, since Satya took over, is a developer-first company. Everything
they're doing is designed to give developers better tools on whatever platform
they choose.

As we're all aware by now, Google is an advertising company (with a heap of
technology, but it's still a company which primarily sells advertising).

~~~
bjpbakker
> Everything they're doing is designed to give developers better tools on
> whatever platform they choose

This is what people said about Google too a few years back.

The reality is: Everything they're doing is designed to increase the company
value for their shareholders.

~~~
sooheon
But that is an obvious observation. Almost a tautology. The question is _how_
they choose to go about doing it. One company plans to keep selling me off to
advertisers. Another plans to provide me with software.

~~~
bjpbakker
> One company plans to keep selling me off to advertisers. Another plans to
> provide me with software.

That's not exactly true. Both companies have shown that they _will_ switch to
selling something different when they believe they can make more money that
way.

Also, both these companies spy on you while using their products, and both
sell that data to their advertisers. It's not just Google.

You should use both their products as you want, when they help you. My point
is mainly not to trust that the company behind the developer products is some
kind of a good actor. They will sell you out when it fits them.

------
etaioinshrdlu
Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly
accepted (here) best practicies through and through.

Very transparent to users, open core, very modern tech stack, entirely remote
workforce, what more could you ask of a company? They aim to do things
basically the way we as a community would ask.

How will it turn out? Anyone's guess :)

~~~
chrisseaton
> Gitlab, from my outside perspective, seems to be a company run with commonly
> accepted (here) best practicies through and through.

Don't they have massive scaling problems? And didn't they delete their
production database by mistake recently?

GitHub doesn't seem to have faced the same problems - so it seems difficult to
argue GitLab has better practices.

> what more could you ask of a company?

Reasonable page response times?

~~~
bjpbakker
> didn't they delete their production database by mistake recently

That was in February 2017 [0]. Not exactly recently IMO.

I recall that Github also had data loss and scaling issues back when they were
starting up. Those days are now gone for them though.

[0] - [https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-
database-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-database-
incident/)

~~~
iofiiiiiiiii
February 2017 is very much recent days, though?

~~~
dpcx
A year and a half in internet time might as well be a decade for the rest of
the business world.

The real question is did they learn from their mistakes and implement better
guardrails to prevent this from happening in the future?

------
conquistadog
For self-hosters like me, I like and recommend Gitea [1] (based on gog). Same
workflow as GitHub, but in your own hands. You can open it up to the masses or
keep it close to the vest, your call. A Docker version is available, but its
Go-ness makes it super easy (and even lighter) to deploy on its own anyway.

[1] [https://gitea.io/en-us/](https://gitea.io/en-us/)

~~~
spin
I third this. I've installed/maintained and used gitolite, gitlab and gitea.

\- gitolite: easiest to install and manage. But there's no web interface. Your
entire workflow is with git itself (and maybe some SSH/Unix tricks/scripts).

\- gitlab: huge, bloated beast. Many, many different components. Difficult to
understand all the pieces. Uses a ton of ram and CPU cycles. UI and workflow
is different from Github.

\- gitea: single, stand-alone package. UI and work-flow is identical to
Github. Given all that it does, it seems about as simple and light-weight as
it could be. (My only pain point is that it's written in Go, with Go packages,
and I don't really know anything about Go...)

------
hden
If anyone is looking for a alternative without tech giants’ grasp on it, Git
over IPFS (or SSB) might me a interesting solution.

~~~
dzhiurgis
> SSB

Single Sideband Radio?

~~~
hardwaresofton
Probably
[https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot](https://github.com/ssbc/scuttlebot)

------
gtirloni
_Some programmers were concerned about how Microsoft -- historically critical
of open-source tools like GitHub and GitLab -- would change the platform as
its new owner._

I wasn't aware MS was critical of GitHub and GitLab. Does anyone has more info
on this?

~~~
kgwgk
Critical of open-source tools.

For the benefit of the reader, they explain that GitHub and GitLab are (more
or less) open-source tools.

~~~
OJFord
GitLab is more or less open source; GitHub isn't. (Though it is arguably an
'open source tool' \- i.e. 'tool _for_ open source'...)

~~~
kgwgk
That’s why I said “more or less”. And apart from being used for open-source,
GitHub is obviously built upon git (which is open source).

------
drakenot
"Alphabet’s role in funding the 350-person firm comes soon after it lost out
to Microsoft in the bidding for GitHub. "

Can someone describe to me how bidding for companies like GitHub works? Is it
a blind bid where the highest bidder is selected? Or are participants given
the opportunity to up their bid against one another?

~~~
shagie
It should be noted that the “bid” also included the ceo to be. And _that_ was
a critical part of winning the bid.

There was certainly more to it than comparing two numbers.

------
pibefision
Congrats to the whole Gitlab team! Great product and awesome people.

~~~
tryum
I'm always wondering why github is more successful than gitlab... What github
has that gitlab can't offer ?

~~~
rpeden
Perhaps it's just because GitHub came first?

The market segment of web hosted Git repositories was a relatively new and
small market segment when GitHub got started back in 2008.

GitLab didn't appear until 2011, and at the time it didn't feel to me like a
direct competitor. So GitHub had quite a bit of extra time to establish its
presence and capture a large share of a growing market.

For a large chunk of GitHub's users, GitHub fulfills their needs well enough
that they don't feel much motivation to make a change. Even if GitLab is
better than GitHub for a person or company, it has to be better enough to be
worth the pain of switching.

And I think for most users, that just isn't the case. Speaking anecdotally,
there are some things about GitLab I like more than GitHub. And if I were
starting out, I'd likely pick GitLab. But all of my code is on GitHub, and
although I pay a monthly fee for private repos, it's small enough that it
doesn't bother me.

~~~
dsumenkovic
Thank you for your feedback, we really appreciate your words. Here's the brief
doc explaining how to easily import your project to GitLab if you missed it
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html).

~~~
rpeden
Thanks for the reply.GitLab's community outreach is certainly on point!

I haven't gone through that document yet, but I'll take a look.

------
leowoo91
Good ol' Google. Shuts down code.google, promotes GitHub, then pays for
competition.

~~~
joeblau
Then buys competition, rolls competition into new code.google, then shuts down
competition.

~~~
glogla
Then shuts down new code.google.

~~~
minikomi
Then creates a new chat app

~~~
digianarchist
Social network. The second Wave.

------
cedricziel
I don't want to nitpick, but the Article says Alphabet.

~~~
IshKebab
Alphabet is Google.

~~~
DuckyC
No, Alphabet is the parent company to Google. There's a slight difference.

~~~
taneq
It's Google plus companies that Google has spun off?

~~~
JustSomeNobody
Google birthed a parent company called Alphabet.

~~~
jake_the_third
Well I'll be.. A parent-child relationship more odd than those found in os
process hierarchies.

------
kylnew
I wonder if this is a sign Google is sad they didn’t acquire GitHub first and
now feel a competitive pressure to do something.

~~~
dpcx
Google invested early in Gitlab. I'm not saying you're wrong, but they've been
in this space for a long time already.

~~~
dsumenkovic
That's correct, here are more details about that.
[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-
raises-20-million...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/10/09/gitlab-
raises-20-million-to-complete-devops/)

------
detaro
earlier discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025437](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18025437)

------
jplayer01
Can we stop giving Google more control and influence over our lives? They're
not any better than Microsoft.

------
pimmen
The only thing I miss from Github is the traffic analysis, otherwise I’m fully
content with Gitlab.

------
MordodeMaru
What are your thoughts on Auto DevOps? It seems that Gitlab is being perceived
more and more as an end-to-end devops platform that is mostly automated but
I've heard it doesn't work really well.

~~~
rleigh
Potentially, very powerful. Running docker-based pipelines, deploying on
kubernetes, and having it all integrated with the merge request review
workflow is really, really nice. GitHub doesn't do anything at this level at
all, even with third-party integrations.

Right now, I've got several local machines hooked up to gitlab.com as runners.
A mixture of virtual machines for various platforms, and docker hosts. No
kubernetes yet; but likely at some point.

The main problems are that sometimes gitlab.com is flaky. Pipeline jobs fail,
never get started, or never complete. Not often, but enough that I can't
guarantee things will work without manual prodding. I saw quite a few
instances of this a few weeks ago, but it's been OK this week. Stuff like the
runner timing out pulling a docker image, the job completing but not actually
finishing, or the pages job running but the deploy step getting stuck with no
way to debug it.

Other things are UI annoyances, like the pipeline status not updating
frequently enough, leading to repeated manual page refreshes, particularly on
navigating back in the history to the pipeline page from a specific job page.

~~~
jl-gitlab
Hey, PM at GitLab for CI/CD here. We're making a lot of investments in both
the infrastructure supporting gitlab.com as well as the functionality and
reliability of the CI pipelines themselves, including looking at intermittent
issues and other patterns of reports coming in through our support team.

I'm really glad to hear you're excited about the way we integrate everything
together.. that's something we're really proud of with our product and an area
we're going to continue to invest in as well. This year we're going to
explicitly plan things out so that we're building a breadcrumb trail back for
all users to start taking advantage of those more advanced features.

You can check out the rest of our vision for 2019 here:
[https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify](https://about.gitlab.com/direction/verify)
\- would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on it.

------
d0ugie
> .. trust Microsoft more

 _ducks in advance_ \- I acknowledge that Microsoft and Google are not without
sin, especially Google, but at least the coding and engineering teams of
Google that I've been watching, namely the prolific #webperfmatters crowd
behind free beer contributions such as SPDY, QUIC, WebM/WebP,
mod/ngx_pagespeed, Brotli, HSTS pinning and leveraging other teams' Google
assets like SERPs and Chrome padlock design to pressure the adoption of HTTPS
use, at least that behavior, talent and energy seems to be in line with the
gist of Github. These teams collaborate with organizations you (plural) find
much less threatening, for example with Brotli (gzip alternative), there was
collaboration between veteran Google and Mozilla developers, and now about 85%
of us use browsers that have implemented Brotli support which, in addition to
claims and my own testing, is across-the-board superior to gzip in this
context. As for adoption on the server side, NGINX at least was open minded.

All the time independent developers cook up superior things to prevailing
standards but, lacking the might of Google and Microsoft and Mozilla, their
work seldom gains traction. Git* under control of Microsoft and Google could
give the little guys with the superior code a better spotlight, a symbiotic
win-win for everybody.

I am convinced guys like Ilya Grigorik and Colt Mcanlis show up to work, and
to public lectures, with making the web faster as their objective. Were they
pressured to insidiously exploit Gitlab to our detriment, they'd blow whistles
to stop Google, like with AI collaborations with the military, or at least
resign, I'd hope. They'd have better and nobler things to do than be party to
that.

Judging from the pronounced skepticism and negative consensus among this crowd
to such actions, I think you will do an effective job hedging the risks and
"keeping them [Google, Microsoft] honest" with respect to treasures like
Github and Gitlab, both in your scrutiny and the influence you wield.

I also think that, if they behave themselves, their control over Github/Gitlab
may give them more return on their respective investments than were they to Do
Evil. Further, if they can't resist their undesirable habits, or even if they
do behave, a market has already been created for some sort of Lavabit-like set
of competitors to emerge, and that should be regarded as a good thing as
another consensus hereabouts has been, before Microsoft's involvement, that
Github's growth was a threat and at odds with our interests.

That said, note the lack of citations in my comment indicating that this is
nothing but unfounded devil's-advocate corporate-apologist Google-fanboy
speculation on my part and that you all are probably right... Cheers
everybody!

edit: Ouch, i thought that was more substantive than contrarian. Before this
gets voted to death, could someone please offer a rebuttal? I'm often wrong
and it could help me wake up.

------
gaius
I can well imagine a bidding war for Gitlab between Google and Oracle.

~~~
Aeolun
Please no.

------
ealhad
Is there a GitHub/GitLab-like project using ActivityPub?

~~~
Arkanosis
It's being discussed:
[https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed](https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed)

~~~
ealhad
Thank you. I hope this will work!

------
dragonwriter
And yet GCP (e.g., Code Repositories) only supports GitHub and BitBucket
integration, not GitLab.

------
gregoriol
Ok Google, please leave Gitlab alone!

------
dqpb
It needs a diff review system like Phabricators Differential

------
diminish
Apple buys Microsoft and becomes the first $2T company.

------
lifeisstillgood
oh ok - now I get it...

