
GitLab’s CEO reflects on GitHub’s move to offer free private repos - whoisnnamdi
https://about.gitlab.com/2019/01/07/github-offering-free-private-repos-for-up-to-three-collaborators/
======
gandutraveler
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.

~~~
bromuro
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!

~~~
pvinis
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

------
ccostes
> 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.

~~~
tomglynch
It's crazy that they began building GitLab without knowing of Bitbucket. Talk
about doing some product research before building...

~~~
jchw
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.

~~~
sl1ck731
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.

------
Jnr
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).

~~~
atomi
+1 for Gogs. It's a perfect fit for small private repos.

------
atonse
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.

~~~
Meph504
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.

~~~
GrzegorzWidla
GitHub already has quite robust integrations with Azure DevOps and things will
likely get even more aligned in the future.

------
quickthrower2
Atlassian Bitbucket [1] offer private repos too:

> 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](https://bitbucket.org/product)

~~~
endianswap
As it says in TFA...

~~~
quickthrower2
The pertinent point is 5 users. That is not mentioned in “The Fine Article”

------
ykevinator
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.

~~~
tzfld
I wouldn't be surprised Gitlab being bought by one of these.

------
dhdhrhdhsj
Man, the GitLab astroturfing in HackerNews is getting annoying.

~~~
beckler
Yeah, let's get some subversion astroturfing going on in here to balance it
out.

------
ddtaylor
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.

~~~
jchw
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.

~~~
ddtaylor
> 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.

~~~
jchw
>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.

~~~
chopin
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.

There's an RFC for csv data
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180)),
there's no way to tell Excel to honour it.

~~~
jchw
>There's an RFC for csv data
([https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180](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.

~~~
chopin
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...

