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Comment by DouweM | Hacker News Reader

> 1. My hosting is way more reliable than yours :-)

You've got me there :) I'm sure your aware of our intention to greatly improve GitLab.com reliability and performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues

> 4. My repository mirroring is quite a lot better than yours, as it's instant, not hourly

Heh, care to share? :) Maybe we can take some pointers from your implementation. How does your repository mirroring know that the upstream repo was updated? Do you use webhooks on GitHub? That would actually be pretty easy to implement, an `update_mirror` GitLab API endpoint that GitHub could call to, hmm...

> 5. I prefer to have a commercial relationship with important tools. You seem like nice people, let's see what happens when you get acquired.

What are you afraid of?

> As long as you can't be bothered to sell to 2-person teams, I'll just run CE and have my commercial relationship with AWS instead.

Fair enough!

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> Do you use webhooks on GitHub? That would actually be pretty easy to implement,

Bingo. Full implementation, in Bash: http://faq.sealedabstract.com/gitlab_mirror/

> What are you afraid of?

Mostly, that you'll get bought by the likes of Oracle. In spite of my quibbles about CE features, I think you're doing a (mostly) fine job of CE right now. But your acquirer will see CE as a cost center (there's no revenue) and will want to "streamline" by focusing on enterprise (where your balance sheet is). GitLab.com will also look like a cost center, and will either shut down, turn into a datamining opportunity, or go through the bad PR of no longer being free. I fully anticipate, in 5-10 years time, that I will be running a CE fork to get out from under your acquirer, just like StarOffice, MySQL, Hudson, etc.

Contrast with GitHub, who makes a silly amount of money from people like me. Their acquirer would be mad to screw up a winning formula.

The good news is, GitLab is such a good product that I still hugely prefer it even after "pricing in" the risk (cough, certainty) that my days are numbered. It is an amazing tool, it really shows that you care about it. For now.

All right, I see where you're coming from. I think any eventual GitLab acquirer would be mad to screw up _our_ winning open core formula, but I'm not in a position to tell the future or make any promises.

I've asked our CEO Sid (you know, the "GitLab CEO here" guy) to chime in.

> I think any eventual GitLab acquirer would be mad to screw up _our_ winning open core formula

Understand, I want to believe. I want to live in a world where open core works at VC scale and over long timeframes. I'd love to run all my own projects that way, if it was possible. And who knows, maybe you will be the people to do it where everybody else failed.

It's just the available evidence suggests I don't live in that world. In my world, you have to pay money for things if you want them to last. I'd like to pay you money, but you don't want it, and that's weird.

Look at it from my POV. GitLab isn't "just" another tool for me, it's my homepage. I'm in there hours every day. I trust it to store my life's work. That's amazing! People literally kill to get that deeply embedded into their customers lives. But it's also a huge responsibility. You and I are in the honeymoon period right now, but when times get tough and we have 3 kids and a mortgage, it's going to get real.

You may not be in a position to speculate that far out, but I have to. I'm still going to need this product in five years. You might not need me.

We can't promise we'll never be acquired but we when we raised financing we tried to ensure that we're as much in control of our destiny as you can be as a VC founded start up. For example last month we were cash flow neutral.

GitLab CE is MIT licensed and will not go away in case we get acquired. Some companies (including Oracle themselves) are using GitLab CE with thousands of users (they rebranded it as Orahub, don't ask).

For our promises regarding being a good steward of CE please see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship

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