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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab seems to fit all the Open Source Project ideals and philosophy. They don't want the burden of managing a dozen difference software or services for their development, they want coding, not time messing with Ops. And it has to be Open Source and no lock it. And Gitlab could even host it for you with with out you having the hassle.

Amazon, Google. One of them likely to acquire Gitlab. Strategically speaking both company would be a great fit for Gitlab, the only problem is both company absolutely loathe Ruby and Rails.

Or there could be another slim possibility, Microsoft decide to Open Source Github Core.

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Generally speaking when software companies get acquired, the product dies.

If a company is being bought by a bigger company, it only means that the profits aren’t good enough for that company to go public, while at the same time a return is owed to its investors. It means that the company played loose with other people’s money and selling the company is the way out.

In other words companies that are sold are companies that are struggling.

And if that’s the case, the product itself will struggle to generate profits post acquisition as well. And I think there aren’t many examples that are an exception to this rule.

We certainly see YouTube or Instagram flourishing as a result of scale. But those are the exception.

GitHub was sold because GitHub wasn’t profitable or hype-driven enough to go public. It remains to be seen if GitHub survives.

But back to a potential acquisition of GitLab, if it ever happens, I believe GitLab will die, with a community fork being the only way out.

I’m writing this because HN has a fetish for acquisitions, which is interesting since to me an acquisition is often a death announcement.

Let's say that's all true - why would anyone ever acquire a company if its for certain, by virtue of being on sale, flailing?

I think it's often the case that the product dies, but I honestly believe that's more often than not down to the new parent company having no idea how to run and manage the product and team.

> Or there could be another slim possibility, Microsoft decide to Open Source Github Core

Or there could be another slim possibility, Microsoft decide to acquire GitLab...

"slim possibility"

If Microsoft was dumb enough to pay 7+ bn for Github, there's probably a good chance they'd do something stupid again and bust out another fat stack of billions for Gitlab.

Then the Department of Justice will step in and it'll be 2001 all over again

Thanks for sharing this! Yes, instead of a version control system that lets people try out different integrations, GitLab provides an opinionated (yet flexible with key integrations and the option to opt out of anything you don't want) way to run the entire software development and deployment lifecycle.

You can learn more about the different stages of the DevOps lifecycle on our Product page [1].

[1] - https://about.gitlab.com/product/

Regarding acquisition, our goal is to go public on Wednesday November 18, 2020. You can read more about our goals and in which order we want to achieve them on our Strategy page [1].

[1] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/#sequence

>the only problem is both company absolutely loathe Ruby and Rails.

Google may, but I'm not sure this is true for Amazon. In the 2000s Amazon converted to a platform/services/API company. One of their directives was that teams could use any programming language they wanted to implement services, as long as the only interface to that service was via published API. As such, implementation language doesn't matter as much there, and Amazon's culture seems less picky over it. Has this changed since?

https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX

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