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Comment by brainless | Hacker News Reader

I have a genuine curiosity about GitLab as a business:

Are they actually growing much more in the mindset of developers since GitHub started doing some things right?

I have personally always wanted alternatives and GitLab* is a good one, but the reason I can not say they are a great one is because somehow* their story to me feels too much "against GitHub" than their own story.

GitHub made a lot of mess and eventually they undid some or just enough that they still retain the lion's share of public repos/projects. This matters a lot because community is great power, whoever holds it, holds key to future mindshare.

I want GitLab to be a larger part of the developers mindset everywhere, but I am not sure that is happening at the moment. Why not? If my assumptions are wrong, that is also acceptable to me, would like to see some signals.

* typo fixed

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Biggest features of GitLab has been the integrated CI and the Omnibus docker image.

Those two things are pretty much what makes it better than other self hosted solutions.

Gitlab is much cheaper and for companies building closed source projects there’s no need to be using what the “community” is.

What is "much" with respect to companies?

If company X is paying 10 x (even low) salaries of USD 100K annual, do they want to save say $5K annual if developers do not want?

Tried locally hosted Gitlab once. It was so cumbersome to install I doubt I'd ever try again without containers or proven installers.

The Omnibus package is literally a one line install.

Historically their upgrades cause issues; I remember the time I upgraded our self-hosted installation and LDAP logins were broken, for example.

I've never seen anyone complain about the updates, in my own experience you can always update on day one without any issues.

Off topic anecdote on installing GitLab.

My university asked me to install GitLab on a 32bit Dell Server made circa ~2002 while I was a teaching assistant, because we were conducting a hands-on class of reimplementing TCP/IP and IT wanted everything we were doing airgapped off the school network.

Unfortunately the omnibus package is 64bit-only so I had to build from source... which was pretty hard. But I was only able to do that after figuring out how to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 to 16.04 with the only input being a CD (not even DVD) drive. I don’t remember why OTA upgrade was failing, I think the version was too old. Managed to get Ubuntu 12.04 or something thinned down enough to fit on a CD. From which network upgrade worked.

Whole process took ~20 hours over a few days. Craziest install I’ve ever had to do... University would have saved a bunch of money if they had just bought us a new small 64Bit server. Ah well.

I installed it within 5 minutes locally. If anything, Gitlab is perfect to quickly set up code repositories in environments where on-prem is a hard requirement.

Perhaps it has gotten better. My experience was a few years ago.

> This matters a lot because community is great power, whoever holds it, holds key to future mindshare.

Bitbucket and atlassian are still surviving despite not having any community presence on them. As long as bitbucket offers value(self hosting, CI, etc) and enterprises use them I think it'll be fine.

You see the today, but you miss the tomorrow. If you venture out on the Internet you will see people complaining against them fairly religiously.

Every large enterprise that fell, stood once.

Most companies that I see using Bitbucket do so not because it's a good product but because it's usually cheap when you are already paying for JIRA and Confluence and because of the tight integration with those tools.

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