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Comment by konschubert | Hacker News Reader

What a strange post.

GitLab is under siege from GitHub.

The argument for GitLab has always been that they are more feature-rich, the argument for GitHub has been that their uptime is >80% and their UX is excellent.

If GitHub achieves feature parity, GitLab is dead.

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The arguments for gitlab are that they are open source and that self-hosting isn't an afterthought.

We need more of both.

Unless you want their enterprise features. Gitlab is open core.

The source for the enterprise features is still open, no?

No, the source for the enterprise features are not open.

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...

https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/

    License model
    GitLab is built on an open core model. That means there are two versions of GitLab: Community Edition and Enterprise  Edition.

    GitLab Community Edition is open source, with an MIT Expat license. GitLab Enterprise Edition is built on top of Community Edition: it uses the same core, but adds 
    additional features and functionality on top of that. This is under a proprietary license.
    
    For both versions: All javascript code in GitLab is open source. All javascript code written by GitLab is under the same MIT license.

GitLab EE is still source-available: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee

Source available is not open source. Per the open source definition:

https://opensource.org/osd-annotated

It is cool that they're source available, but that's still not the same. Putting a disclaimer that you work for gitlab would also be appreciated.

Does putting a disclaimer on a one line comment that states a fact really do any good?

This exactly. Some people keep saying that gitlab is open source when in reality it's open core.

However, that core is REALLY BIG. I do not really miss any enterprise feature. I ordered enterprise edition only to support it and I never installed it.

Well a lot of enterprises care about things like user directories (LDAP) and the extra access control. Just because you don't need enterprise features doesn't mean that large enterprises (the target audience for Gitlab Enterprise) don't!

I'm not saying it isn't great stuff, it really is, but "it is all open source" is sort of a misnomer. It is open core.

I'm of the same opinion with Dave Neary on Open Core Software. He's a long time contributor to the GNOME Desktop Environment:

https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2010/07/19/rotten-to-the-open-...

You are right in general. Most open core tools do not let anything enterprise like into community versions. However, Gitlab is somewhat different. For example is that it lets you have LDAP/AD integration in core version. Compare that to lets say Mattermost which doesn't.

And yes, I need enterprise stuff, I just don't need enterprise stuff currently in Gitlab. Looks to me those stuff are created for really big teams and really big multinational companies. My company is 1200+ employees big with IT having around 70 people, and in that context I don't miss anything.

Futhermore, some enterprise features finish in core after some time. I have never witnessed the opposite in Gitlab.

Alternatively GitLab might one day achieve some kind of usable uptime.

We use Gitlab for work because the self-hosted version is free. For small companies Github is a pretty steep unnecessary expense, and we appreciate control over our own servers. Unless Github makes a self-hosted version there isn't really a comparison for us.

To me Github is about the community. Lots of open source software and forks of that software, you can put your profile on your resume. Gitlab has more features and self-hosting; Github has a coding social network.

I know the "free" price tag seems nice at first. How did you calculate in the cost for:

- maintaining and updating your servers

- updating the free software

- backups

- recovering from backups in situations where your servers fail?

I don't think you get that for free? If you consider those costs, the price tag for a hosted solutions becomes more and more reasonable.

We run Gitlab on premise during last 4 years and I can't complain on those costs - updates are "click this button", backups are few hours work to have, there are no server maintenance whatsoever if you don't count runners and we didn't yet have catastrophic failure so I can't guess on that.

So far, price was next to nothing relative to mass of functionalities given in free version.

> maintaining and updating your servers

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

> updating the free software

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

> backups

We setup a cronjob that backs up the server

> recovering from backups in situations where your servers fail?

We are able to recover in a reasonable timeframe. We take occasional server snapshots, and in the case of the machine completely going dark we could spin up one of those snapshots, dist-upgrade, and apply our git / Gitlab back and be back to normal.

Your concerns are good concerns for big companies. For small companies who don't need 99.99% SLA, running git/Gitlab on your own server is tremendously more reasonable than Github's paid plans.

> If GitHub achieves feature parity, GitLab is dead.

Maybe, assuming GH matches them at the same price points per feature and including self-hosting as a feature.

GitHub does offer self-hostable enterprise edition, but its price is not publicly available.

Then it's going to lose against the free gitlab, and the pricing page (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/) that doesn't even have a "contact us for a price" option.

Almost as if that was the point of me including the words "but its price is not publicly available" in my comment.

GH is now Microsoft. Not everyone's cup 'o tea, so GL has this going on for them as well.

Unless you trust the GitLab team to be better than Microsoft owned GitHub

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