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Comment by Trundle | Hacker News Reader

Dear lord these guys are putting in work. I'm not exactly a huge supporter of Github (the company not the product) so I'm very glad to see it. I look forward to their continued growth.

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Yeah, but I wish they'd give more credit where due.

On their markdown page they claim "For GitLab we developed something we call "GitLab Flavored Markdown" (GFM)." while that is obviously a ripoff of GitHub Flavoured Markdown.

GitHub Flavored Markdown is itself a rip of the markdown standard. Is it giving enough credit to markdown for GitHub to include the word "markdown" in the name? If so, then by extension it should be sufficient for GitLab to include "flavored markdown" in the name. ;)

Thats a good point! I did not see it that way.

The many "standards" of Markdown also now include CommonMark [1]. There is also some interesting history as to why it is not named "Standard Markdown".

[1] http://commonmark.org/ [2] https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

Man, as much as I admire and respect his intelligence, sometimes Gruber can be quite unreasonable.

Yeah, after reading that I came away with a really REALLY sour taste in my mouth. What got stuck in his craw and died?

It's also especially annoying when you consider that Gruber seems opposed to the idea of anyone else fleshing out Markdown properly, but he's not doing anything himself. At some point what he did with Markdown was basically just squatting on it himself, making any improving of it at the source impossible.

I think phrasing it as "also now include CommonMark" is a little misleading, it has been around for a few years now and the entire goal is to take the quotes off of the "standards" to actually have a Markdown specification. The drivers behind it also include (IIRC) GitHub and StackExchange.

That said, I did not notice the "GitLab Flavored Markdown" in the story link but I'll be fairly disappointed if it is actually "yet another Markdown pseudo-standard" and not CommonMark.

I agree we should give attribution here and created https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests/3546 to do so. Edit: this was merged.

This is why I like GitLab! Thanks for doing this :)

You're not only productive at shipping quality features but also listening to people using your product! This makes me even happier to be using it at work :)

Thank you for your kind words. Two funny things:

1. We're now at Git Merge http://git-merge.com/ and I'm looking forward to presenting at 4pm Eastern.

2. I said it was merged but Douwe used our Merge when build succeeds. A HN reader commented about a mistake and I was able to fix it in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commit/79d6513f360d7... Thanks Greg!

@dang I'm sorry for this. Please understand I was inebriated when I posted this comment, but I will always appreciate your work and if you ban me for the following comment, I understand.

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syste - I love you man. You are an amazing CEO. Your company does great work and has a great product. I always become so happy when I see you actively responding to the comments here. You are a role model CEO.

Something so many companies overlook is actually listening to their users and taking their feedback seriously. I love you man, if you wrote an autobiography I would buy it. Congratulations to you and your team.

Thanks! Glad to know if I write something about myself it will have a minimum of two buyers (my mom is very supportive too).

I like to write about business stuff most. Any merge requests on our handbook https://about.gitlab.com/handbook and strategy https://about.gitlab.com/strategy are appreciated.

styse, you are a great motivation for the product company I run. I checked your strategy page and you are planning to integrate with NetSuite. Why not something open source for finance? ERPNext?

disclaimer: I am the founder of erpnext

Thanks for your kind words. ERPNext looks cool. We try to use open source where we can although we also try to use boring solutions. In this case we already completed the NetSuite implementation so we're not in the market at the moment. BTW I'm not sure ERPNext is ideal for our use case, we would need multi-company consolidation.

The lines with soft line breaks (double spaces at the end) appear to have had their trailing whitespace trimmed, which ends up looking like:

    Roses are red Violets are blue
    
    Sugar is sweet

rather than:

    Roses are red
    Violets are blue
    
    Sugar is sweet

Sorry, I'm committing from The Git Merge conference and didn't have the time. It should render OK. Feel free to submit a merge request to fix it.

You know what's even better to me than GitHub-Flavoured Markdown? Markdeep:

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/

Demo:

https://casual-effects.com/markdeep/features.md.html

Yes, I know they likely provided it for compatibility, but markdeep is just too cool to not mention.

I do hate the fact that they use yet-another-markdown-flavour.

I wish they'd move over to CommonMark, which actually attempts to standardize Markdown once and for all.

>Dear lord these guys are putting in work.

man I wish they would bring something new, cool and innovative to the space, instead being bent on doing feature-by-feature copy of github.

They have an amazing opportunity now to take advantage of github fatigue. But they are throwing it all away by trying to become an inferior clone of github.

It has integrated CI whereas GitHub requires using a third-party CI system, it's had Reaction Emoji (called Award Emoji for GitLab) for a while now, it has "Merge when build succeeds", CE is entirely FOSS, etc.

Thanks! People also seem to like our new todo's https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/02/gitlab-todos-feature-hig... that allow you to respond to what's important even if your mailbox is a mess.

I'd honestly be really surprised if Github didn't end up acquiring one of those CI systems which they already integrate with.

I'd be surprised if they did. I really don't see a business reason for them doing so. They are clearly laser focused on enterprise, which means massively bespoked internal build systems and work flow. And they'll be competing against a lot of entrenched internal solutions.

GitLab and Atlassian have a pricing model for displacing existing systems and encouraging adoption, but I can't see GitHub following suit. GitHub looks to like they want to be the Apple in the Apple vs Android. Android has the largest user base but due to Apple's premium pricing, they have the largest profit.

There seems to be a healthy competition between various ci software that works with github. Why would github try to kill that and take on such a high touch area.

Its quite puzzling why gitlab went that route, they are basically discouraging ci systems from integrating with them. I think this is would turn out to be a bad decision for gitlab.

Well, their CI is pretty good for starters... compared to self hosting jenkins, or paying for Travis CI. Self hosting gitlab integrated CI runners is a big plus for me.

As a third party service provider you could still host and/or modify those CI runners for specific tasks like node, go, etc.

Thanks tiplus!

And to give some additional background to dominotw's question. We didn't like the options for CI on-premises. And by integrating it directly into GitLab it is very easy set up a new project, encouraging people to use CI on more projects.

Having people use GitLab CI will mean GitLab is a less attractive platform for other CI products. We do have a good commit status API since GitLab 8.1 and there is a great Jenkins plugin that supports that http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/integration/jenkins.html

Requirements likely driven by sales/marketing team: either they see the gap or they hear it from potential customers.

They do have some differences if you look close enough.

I’m a juuuuge GitHub supporter, but let me provide a different perspective: In business, there is product innovation and there is also business innovation.

Sometimes, you provide exactly the same product, but the way in which you do business around that product is the innovation. For example, a 100% open-source implementation of the JVM needn’t provide any technical innovation whatsoever: The innovations are in how it’s developed and how it’s licensed.

I won’t speak to whether GitLab is providing any business innovation or not, I’m just pointing out that if they are, that’s something of value in its own right.

They were getting a lot of heat when they refused to copy GitHub, because a lot (most?) of GitHub's features are just obvious and helpful. So... being a clone shouldn't be your whole strategy, but you should still learn from the competition.

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