Hacker News Reader

Comment by eikenberry | Hacker News Reader

Atlassian is going after the enterprise market. They don't care about free software developers.

That's a poor strategy. All developers start out as free software developers, then gain employment. I persuaded my work to purchase Gitlab EE licenses, due to ease of use and it's excellent features & support. I can't imagine I'd say the same of Atlassian products.

Capture awareness / interest early.

You'd be in the minority. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd bet you're at a small company where a low-level employee's opinion was taken into account when making the decision of which product to use for 10-50 people.

In medium to large sized companies, Atlassian will usually win out when you have a CTO that manages 100+ developers. Enterprises really like to stick with the "safe bet", where there are expensive licenses and dedicated account managers from the service provider.

Jira in particular is extremely popular with the modern addiction to Agile. Once you're on Jira, you just start to fall onto connecting all the related products like Confluence for wiki and Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash) for git. I'm not saying it's the best thing to just ignore all other offerings, but in my experience CTOs do exactly that and just go straight to Atlassian for everything.

Basically, if your company is using Exchange... expect to be forced onto Atlassian. Welcome to the enterprise.

At $WORK we use Jira/Confluence, and instead of Bitbucket Server we chose Gitlab because I have experience with it, and it comes with integrated CI.

BTW, this is not some small startup...

Cool to hear that! For reference, since many organizations use Jira GitLab CE and EE have extensive Jira integration http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html

Yep, if that didn't exist we would have had to go with Bitbucket Server.

I've used plenty of other options- we even ran an internal GitLab instance prior to moving to BitBucket at my last company. Atlassian's suite of products are a safe bet because they're generally good products.

I like the GitLab feature set more than BitBucket but when I went started my own company it was generally cheaper for my team of 5-8 to use hosted JIRA, BitBucket, and Confluence then it would be for me to pay AWS/Rackspace/Azure/Digital Ocean to run the F/OSS equivalents in our cloud environment. BitBucket integrates just fine with Jenkins and the new Project organization was much needed.

We may someday move to GitLab or something else, but there isn't anything wrong with choosing Atlassian in any way. It's not like they're an Oracle/SAP type company that just abuses their customers and has awful products.

If you want to use GitLab on the cheap consider using GitLab.com, it is totally free and has unlimited repo's and collaborators.

Great to hear you're using JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence together. How is the integration between the tools? It's definitely a use case we're hearing more often where teams need more than just storing and working on code.

They're getting better. BitBucket and JIRA work together quite well. With "Smart Commits" in the JIRA hosted version that allow us to move a ticket's status, comment on it, log time, or just show activity towards a ticket via Git commit messages. I use the heck out of it and the team is following quickly behind.

JIRA follows the feature branching workflow pretty well, so if you branch from dev/master with the ticket number as the start of the branch name you can click through to that branch straight from JIRA, which is generally pretty nice.

Confluence isn't nearly as tightly integrated with either. There are some reports, widgets, and stuff you can grab out of JIRA and make some dashboard type reports. Nothing special- we use Confluence to document architecture, deployment procedures, etc. We're definitely not Confluence power users.

It's so funny that this is the way it's become, as Atlassian grew up being the cheaper, simpler alternative to extremely expensive, super opaque, ultra closed source systems like Clear Case. I remember a time when Atlassian actually raised the prices of Jira's top level of support and service because enterprise CTOs were confused by such a low price point.

Ten years ago I made exactly this migration for a SaaS shop's helpdesk & dev team. At the time JIRA was easily the best value & most customisable solution for integrated ticket tracking. I learned Java & Groovy to write extensions for it. It wasn't just CTO/CIO friendly, JIRA really was the great choice at the time in both UX and ease of implementation. Especially if you'd been bogged down hacking RT or GNATS or permanently scarred by anything from Rational.

What I realised is that eventually they're all ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of a workflow engine and metadata service. Your choice is mainly of the interface and domain-specific layering violations.

Troll-friendly soundbite: Atlassian is the new Rational.

"You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain"

Let us know anything specific you'd have us improve - love to know what changed over the last 10 years to make you change your mind.

> I learned Java & Groovy to write extensions for it

For the last 3 months, Groovy has been officially known as "Apache Groovy".

Yep. I got my work to purchase EE license for Gitlab because it's miles ahead of Bitbucket Server.

Would love to hear what features in your opinion but Gitlab miles ahead of Bitbucket Server.

We tested Bitbucket Server when it was still called Stash, and compared it to Gitlab at the time.

- Merge requests/code review in Gitlab is much better, whereas with Atlassian they recommend purchasing another product

- Integrated Wiki, whereas Atlassian they recommended Confluence

- The UI is absolutely terrible, even now the Bitbucket front-page where it dumps you when logged in is a disorganised mess and I can never find what I am looking for

- Speed, Gitlab running on my own server is MUCH faster, compared to Stash

- There was no way to easily add code snippets to be shared with the rest of the team, ala Snippets.

- Integration with the rest of the Atlassian toolset was so-so, and left a lot to be desired honestly.

- Statistics and information about the code and who is contributing and everything along those lines, makes for pretty graphs that make higher ups happy.

- Bitbucket doesn't currently have a view within the web interface for how many commits have been made to a project. People like numbers, and watching them grow!

- I have to reiterate, the UI is absolutely terrible in Bitbucket/Stash.

And the real killer is that I can get Gitlab CE and never pay you guys a dime, I've in the past helped out in the Github issues with debugging, and I can be part of the community. The only feature from EE that I need is the ability to use LDAP groups to define what users can and can't access various repositories, and the company I work for can afford to help pay for Gitlab's future to stick around!

> All developers start out as free software developers, then gain employment.

I don't think that's true. Some people never get involved in free software even as a hobby. Some people get apprenticeships and learn to program from scratch on the job.

Or, strange as it may seem, they learn how to write software from a four-year college degree. And colleges are notoriously bad at teaching so much as source control, let alone what source control options are there, how to use a bug tracker, etc. (Which makes sense, because you don't strictly need source control if you aren't collaborating heavily, and you don't need a bug tracker if you have a single development week-by-week.)

Seriously... My favorite was in a lower level DB class we had to write, basically, a small PHP app connected to MySQL. On the first day of class the instructor stressed this class was about databases, not PHP, and would basically just cover getting a connection going and the rest was up to us. I think having been doing development and getting paid for it via 'internships' at various companies when I was younger really made me a better, but angrier student in my college CS days. On the one hand, I needed zero time to get up to speed on C, C++, Java, and PHP syntax so I could focus on the algorithms and other topics being taught. But I doing so it became very clear that I was going to the real world and most of this stuff wasn't coming with me.

I agree there is something to be said for bottom-up marketing, but asserting that "all developers start out as free software developers" is completely untrue. In fact, I'd guess that people who actually develop free/OSS software are far outnumbered by those who don't.

I'm guessing Atlassian frequently goes after those sort of enterprises were the decisions are made by management with little input from the actual end-users of the product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com