Hacker News Reader

Comment by glutamate | Hacker News Reader

> GitLab, a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises, ...

This claim is false. The linked survey shows that GitLab has a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers. Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository.

View on HN

I tend to believe claims of the form X is used by Y% of Z, but not give much weight to them because they are usually less impressive than they sound.

For example, I recall IBM marketing once claimed that OS/2 was used in some very high percentage (it was close to 100%, if I recall correctly) of Fortune 500 companies (or some similar group). Did that mean OS/2 was taking off in the enterprise, displacing Windows left and right?

Nope. It just meant that most Fortune 500 companies had at least one OS/2 system. Take advantage of its excellent DOS multitasking to migrate a few legacy DOS systems from dying old hardware to a single new machine under OS/2, and your Fortune 500 company counts as using OS/2 even if that is the only OS/2 system you have.

I bought this up on HN in the past[1], but it gets instantly downvoted( by gitlab employees?) , my comment was a response to CEO claiming how their marketing is honest[2].

They also declared Gitlab CI as number one CI by excluding Jenkins because of their made up defintion of "modern" .

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15590240 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654

You are most likely getting downvoted because of statements such as:

    > These guys are not honest people, just copycats under the guise of "open".

You are right. Thats how i felt but that was unnecessary to say here. Deleted that from my comment.

This whole thread is full of their employees arguing (quite aggressively in some cases) with people for calling them out or questioning their marketing claims. I wouldn't be surprised if they're downvoting en-masse too. Doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in their company and I'm surprised this type of behaviour is allowed on HN.

Last time I checked Jenkins is a modern CI product.

Depends on your definition of modern. I don't really care what you call it, the fact of the matter is that it's slow and an inferior product.

Its not relevant here if its inferior or not. Not counting your competition and declaring yourself as no.1 is dishonest.

I get that. But most likely, that whole spin is the marketing dept's fault. As I said in another comment, they are not technical enough to understand CI/CD and devops terminology.

They are technical enough to evaluate Jenkins and declare it be not worthy enough to be counted as competition, but not technical enough to understand CI/CD.

Seriously?

One thing that is not modern: Having such an idiotic workflow that one engineer can cause a huge outage and delete stuff from prod db.

I understand that too. But in my experience, GitLab CI Runner is the fastest for our stack. I've seen build times reduced from 3 minutes to 59 seconds. I can give exact numbers if you want to scrutinize my statement more.

Edit: I should add, our build artficats are deployed to staging and NOT production.

I don't have a problem believing that Gitlab could be faster for an org's stack, at all.

I do have a problem with you implying Jenkins is not-modern by saying "depends on your definition of modern". Speed is only one factor. It's not ok to lie and hide behind "our marketing is clueless about our tech."

To be completely honest, Jenkins is garbage slow enterprise tier. GitLab CI Runner is a pleasure to work with. Jenkins was hosted on our production box, and it used to freeze up whenever someone pushed.

Marketing folks aren't technical enough to understand CI anyway. This is why marketing folks shouldn't step on us tech folks toes - you'll just look like an idiot and end up embarrassing yourself.

How much do you really care if their marketing department is aggressive? Isn't it better that GitLab is open source and a reasonably good member of the OSS community? Honestly I don't even count those stats as false; Jenkins feels super old and the context weirdness ("Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository") actually makes sense. If this is the trade to support OSS, it's way better than building a shadow surveillance state under the guise of profit via advertising revenue.

>>> if their marketing department is aggressive?

Telling lies /= aggressive. Where advertising makes claims that are objectively false they should be called out. This isn't 'puffing' or hyperbolic opinion. This is saying X is Y. That these lies are in support of an agenda with which many here might agree does not matter.

Sorry to burst your bubble but advertising is always lying and shilling.

That makes it even more important to call it out.

No, it's really not.

Pages I have open:

In the jobs boxout on StackOverflow I'm pretty confident that McLaren Applied Technologies is looking a lead C#/.NET developer.

On another page, the UK Mobile network '3' is offering 12Gb for the price of 4Gb. I know that's true because I took them up on it (and even for 4Gb it's still cheaper than any other network).

I could provide many other counter-examples but I don't need to because you used 'always' in your absolutist statement. Yes, a lot of advertising twists the truth. No, not everything does. And for things that we hold to a higher standard (like a great open source project like Gitlab) we can point out places where they don't meet that standard in the (not unrealistic) hope that they'll improve.

> I'm pretty confident that McLaren Applied Technologies is looking a lead C#/.NET developer.

Are you certain? Maybe they have an internal promotion but company policy/legal compliance forces them to advertise the role publicly?

> On another page, the UK Mobile network '3' is offering 12Gb for the price of 4Gb. I know that's true because I took them up on it (and even for 4Gb it's still cheaper than any other network).

How long for? Is this one of those contracts where it is 3 for 1 for a year then double price next year...

NB I'm absolutely not accusing either of these specific companies of being dishonest.

pretending everything is black and white and painting everyone who makes a non complete statement as liar, is what lead to the current political misery.

> what lead to the current political misery.

Oh no. Not this shit again!.

Not every story has to have some sort of philosophical link to trump winning the election.

yea brushing it off as "aggressive" is ironic Considering how their CEO goes around touting honesty as one their main traits[1] as a company.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15589654

It's not a lie. They linked right to an elaboration of that statement.

Sure, but the link text is deliberately misleading. The stat "3/4 of all enterprises", on its own, is patently false. The fact that you can click the link to "fix" the lie is irrelevant.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good press release!? /s

You're saying it's a falsehood and Nicole Plati, our media contact, gave alternative facts to that.

There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above).

I've been a fan of GitLab's for quite a while (mostly due to your transparency; I just created an account a few weeks ago to try it out) but -- unless you are claiming that GitLab is being used by two-thirds of "all enterprises" -- this is very misleading, IMO.

> There's a very big difference between "2/3 of all enterprises" (press release) and "a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers" (glutamate, above).

And even that is a total pulled out of the ass claim. At most it could be "who responded to our survey"

It would take a lot less than 2/3 to have a representative sample, fwiw

They're an unconnected user referencing Kellyanne Conway, I'm fairly sure.

In that case, my apologies to GitLab. I assumed from the comment ("our media contact") that this was a GitLab employee. Thanks.

Thank you for your candid feedback - we've updated our homepage to include a more accurate headline: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

We claim it based on the assumption that almost all very large companies (enterprise) host their own source code and they are switching to git. We have 2/3 market share with self hosted git as shown with two data points https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/#gitlab-has-23-marke... I'll consider adding the rationale to the page.

We're seeing organizations adopt SaaS but the largest companies tend to be the last ones to switch.

You quote 'a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises'. I see this as a different and weather claim. We and our competition can easily make that claim since almost all Fortune 500 companies have at least one use of GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian.

I would assume, at the very least, that some significant portion of those enterprises who are switching to Git are Microsoft shops who are just switching to a version of TFS that includes Git.

I'd also guess that "Bitrise users" is a sample group that differs in significant ways from "Enterprise users".

From bitrise link

> We randomly selected 10,000 apps as a base

"2/3 of all enterprises" can only be true if all enterprises are building apps on bitrise.

I do agree that the majority of Bitrise their population is not the enterprise at all. The only other representative data we could find was from BuddyBuild https://www.buddybuild.com/blog/source-code-hosting#selfhost... and has the same problem. You can see that it also isn't enterprise because the vast majority of their respondents is cloud hosted.

If there is a better data source we can use I would love to know. It seems hard to get data on self hosted organizations. Traditionally you looked at the number of paying customers, but that doesn't work with open source.

Inability to find the valid metrics you want is not justification to use invalid numbers.

These numbers are the most valid numbers we can find and match what we estimate based on other even less exact data (like the version check build into GitLab).

If you want to publish a research paper, "Yeah, I know this isn't really a valid measurement, but it's the best I can do" isn't going to cut it. This isn't a research paper, but honesty is honesty. If those are the best numbers you have, I would simply not say "X% of enteprises are using" -- because you don't actually know that. I'd say what you know instead, however you can describe it. Yep, it doesn't read as well marketting-wise, true.

In the last 3 enterprises that I've worked in, 2 did (do) use GitLab. So, I guess what I'm saying is, it matches my experience.

> You can see that it also isn't enterprise because the vast majority of their respondents is cloud hosted.

So? I work for a extremely conservative enterprise customer (with strict compliance concerns), and we're still agressively moving to cloud-hosted solutions for most things.

Also, still exclusively using TFVC in TFS for source control.

>I do agree that the majority of Bitrise their population is not the enterprise at all.

> We and our competition can easily make that claim since almost all Fortune 500 companies have at least one use of GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian.

Not sure if you are trolling or are missing the point people are trying to make. You are admitting that you made that conclusion based on wrong data and yet continue to say you claim is correct.

I dunno. I do R&D tax credit studies for hundreds of enterprise software firms and I always ask what version control system(s) they use and where/how it is hosted. I would guesstimate between a third and a half use GitLab in some capacity. And even then a lot of the time it's only for some teams or some projects. I do work with a disproportionate number of MS shops and a disproportionate number of medium to large companies (and few very large companies), but that's kind of the point. Those companies account for a lot of the enterprise market, yet you aren't including them in your claim. You've still got amazing market share and an impressive product, so there's no need to exaggerate. Just say 2/3rds of self-hosted git. That's a powerful enough marketing statement in and of itself.

> a disproportionate number of MS shops

What breakdown of version control systems you seeing? If between a third and a half use GitLab I would love to know what the rest are using.

Just to clarify, between a third and a half use GitLab in some capacity. But to answer your question, I see a lot of TFS these days. Easily 90% of the MS stack firms, and even some with more diverse stacks. And increasingly with the VS git for Windows plugin as the VCS. Those are probably around 50% of my clients.

SVN and Mercurial have a noticeable presence, say around 30% of my clients, but that number seems to be declining. I mostly see this with smaller firms with a single large, mature, legacy product that's in the cash cow stage. They're barely investing in new features, so why bother to upgrade their internal systems?

A really shocking number of firms don't have any VCS whatsoever (around 15%) or individual teams decide on their own solutions (around 10%) or individual teams may supplement the firm wide VCS for production with their own dev solutions (around 15%, which overlaps with all the other categories). A lot of those teams seem to use GitHub private repos or GitLab, though frequently I see institutional constraints prevent them from adopting a self-hosted solution (a company too dumb to set up VCS isn't likely to spring for a server--these are the same people that have dev and prod but no test servers). I frankly don't know how the firms without a VCS function. They tend to be my most challenging clients, so the answer is probably not well.

And then a really large number of firms have legacy homegrown solutions. Probably like 20%. These tend to be larger companies with an in-house tech department supporting a really unremarkable product that's been in use for 20+ years, like an eCommerce solution for a mid-sized retailer or an inventory system for a manufacturer. I think it's probably a much larger segment than shows up in a lot of stats because they tend to be... weird. They feel less like development teams and more like overgrown IT departments.

Notice that these numbers don't add up to 100. That's because there's lots of overlap, especially at larger firms that have grown by acquisition, where individual entities can operate nearly independently. Really, there's a huge selection bias here too. My clients tend to be either very well organized MS shops or nightmarishly anarchic hodgepodges. That's driven by client size and by my firm's market position and by my own sales abilities. I do better with MS shops because that's the stack I use and it makes it easier for me to speak their language, as it were. My firm targets mid-sized companies over very large companies or very small ones.

So take what I say with a grain of salt.

Thanks for the detailed insights!

> We claim it based on the assumption that almost all very large companies (enterprise) host their own source code and they are switching to git.

Almost all × Almost all (even assuming that's not overstated for either of those claims, which given the evidence of your inappropriately narrow definition of “enterprise” and my experience in the parts of that space you don't seem to have considered, I doubt) isn't the same as all, or even almost all.

> We and our competition can easily make that claim since almost all Fortune 500 companies have at least one use of GitHub, GitLab, and Atlassian.

“Enterprise”, as a software market, is more than Fortune 500. Not only is that an overly narrow definition for private, for-profit enterprises, “enterprise” also included large public and non-profit (e.g.—but not exclusively—academic) institutions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com