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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

I'll admit that I was wrong about GitLab. I had the chance to invest in them way back in the day, and passed. My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat, which was more of an outlier than a pattern. And my other thought was that they are competing against GitHub, which was extremely popular and well funded.

I honestly didn't think they stood a chance.

I'm happy to have been proven wrong. Congrats to the whole team on their successful exit!

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I think if GitHub simply gave free private repos sooner, GitLab would’ve had a way harder time.

Disagree. Github's self-hosted product is trash compared to Gitlab. Plus they were very late to the game when it came to stuff like CI, package management, project tracking and a whole suite of enterprise features. Github had (and still has) a huge lead in public open-source development, but that's it.

While yes, my first usage of Gitlab was an on-prem install, things really took off with Gitlab.com in ways I don't think anyone expected with healthy competition from Bitbucket and Github. I do think it was the unlimited free private repos with unlimited contributors that really skyrocketed the success of the Gitlab.com path.

Anecdotally I’ve felt like most of the features GitHub has released for some time now are a clone of something that hit Gitlab first.

Github is initially B2B SMB and B2C and Gitlab is B2B Enterprise. 10% of Github employee are sales , 25% for Gitlab. I would say they are not even competitors

Gitlab was earlier/better at letting companies install a version on-prem.

Their CI story was also a lot better until Github added Actions

Still better I think. Actions are hard to use and ridiculously verbose.

Which part is verbose?

We have been happy customers for many years. It has been a breeze to manage and upgrades, backups, and DR have been very good for us. For an on prem software of this complexity it is quite a feat. It has also always been at a very reasonable and affordable price point for enterprise-y on prem software. As an infosec consultancy that used it for projects and code we always appreciated being able to manage the security of our installation.

I was able to get free unlimited private repos from github and bitbucket since 2011, but we still used the ancestor of gitlab as our local repo.

> My thought at the time was that no open source company had ever been super successful except RedHat

Sun bought MySQL for 1 billion USD in 2008, does that not count as successful?

Also, MongoDB, Elastic and many many others...

MongoDB and Elastic are successful because they are locking features behind a paid license. Does that make it a successful open source company?

GitLab has features in the Enterprise edition that aren’t in the Community edition don’t they?

Yeah, I wasn't trying to say GitHub is different. Instead, this shows a route to profitability for these companies.

Correct.

But GitLab is the same concept...

I meant there were no successful public companies based on open source except RedHat in 2015.

I am always reminded how not so great ideas or even clones when executed well lead to good outcomes.

Any takeaway lessons for evaluating future FOSS startups? Like maybe place higher weight on rate of adding new users?

I've found that my bar for investing is the same no matter what kind of company it is -- how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potential customers, etc.

If I'm not convinced to invest after one meeting, I usually don't invest. On the other hand, if I'm convinced after five minutes, I'm usually asking where to send the wire by the end of the meeting.

Armory is a good example of an open source/open core company I did invest in. They had me convinced in just a few minutes. They had an answer for every one of my objections and made me feel like I'd be missing out if I didn't invest. And so far they're doing really well and it's one of my best investments to date.

> ...how quickly can they sell me on investing? As much as us engineers hate to admit it, the most important skill for a founder is the ability to sell. Besides the obvious of having to sell to customers, they also have to sell their vision to VCs, sell their company to potential employees, sell their vision to journalists and potential customers, etc.

As cynical and hollow as it sounds, pretty sure this advice is consistent with what I have heard in multiple videos and blogs from YC.

See also: "create investor fomo", https://html.duckduckgo.com/html/search?q=create%20fomo%20in...

I wouldn't say it's cynical. At the end of the day companies don't live unless they can make money. So that, by necessity, is step 1.

It's important to not conflate getting investors with getting customers.

Ultimately you care about the latter and you don't always need the former to get there.

Honored to have you as an investor, jedberg!

And I’d modify one thing you said: I believe the #1 most important skill for a startup CEO to master is storytelling —- which is critical for selling, fundraising and recruiting. https://www.founderculture.net/c/new-noteworthy/the-1-must-m...

What do you find is the “best way to sell”?

Have an answer to every objection. First figure out all the ways you would object and make sure you have an answer, then note down any objections you don't have an answer to during your process and make sure you have a good answer next time.

And if you're selling a product, make sure you know your competitors well because a lot of objections will be in the form of "but competitor X does this, how do you solve that problem?" and "what do you do that X doesn't do?". So you better know X really well because the person you're talking to already does and will know if you're making stuff up.

If every investor was apologizing when a company he passed on became successful they would not have any time to do investing anymore.

For any criteria (open source or github as a competitor in that case) you will find some company that became successful. Even the worst one.

I’ll echo a sentiment I also had but perhaps I was wrong. I believed that users of GitLab used GitLab because they didn’t want to pay a premium (or pay at all) for GitHub; thus I viewed it as a cheaper alternative in the same vein as buying a Hyundai vs buying a Mercedes. I assumed only frugal “developers” were using it, and surely any legit companies would opt for the superior GitHub.

Just one user here, but I definitely prefer GitLab over GitHub.

Not because GitHub is bad in any particular way, I just like the feature set and UI of GitLab better. Less of a "Hyundai vs Mercedes" thing, and more of a "Ford vs Chevy" thing.

They're both decent and they both have approximately the same level of "premium-ness". They're just feature-wise and aesthetically slightly different in arbitrary ways. And some people either do or don't vibe better with the one or the other.

Interesting comparison with cars, I would think a Hyundai is much more reliable and less expensive to maintain than a Mercedes, and Hyundai is now being positioned as a more premium brand than it once was.

On topic, GitLab is great at CI/CD and awesome for self-hosting things.

That'd be me, but I stuck around because issue management on GitLab is miles ahead of GitHub - however... if GitHub added scoped labeled I'd have a hard time convincing myself to stick around as the sheer number of users + discovery features blow GitLab out of the water.

Isn't there a PG article on how being the cheap alternative undercutting the high-end incumbent is a good place to be?

Sounds to me like you were only wrong in hindsight. At the time it was a reasonable decision to pass on GitLab in the circumstances.

>which was more of an outlier than a pattern

If you are looking to invest in patterns what makes you special?

I thought the idea was to look for outliers.

VCs are the most risk averse people you will meet. They pretty much only look for patterns. That's why it's so hard for minority/female founders -- because it doesn't fit their pattern. I actually invest mostly in minority/female founders for exactly this reason.

Also, I never said I was any good. :)

IPO success. But still unprofitable as a business though

If you take out their aggresive marketing spending to ack more customers they would be profitable.

Not investing might still have been the right choice, given what you knew at the time about the odds.

(For all we know, their 'true' odds of success might have been really slim, and they just got lucky.)

I just stick my money in widely diversified, low-cost ETFs, since I don't expect to know more than the market.

Is Gitlab 100% open source?

It's really "open core", but they use one code base, so commercial-licensed code is "available" but not under an open source license.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/strategic-market...

NOTE: I'm not associated with GitLab at all I just found the topic interesting. I don't know of many other projects that actually do things this way, with all the commercial licensed code mixed in with the open source code.

This was kind of an interesting speech I found searching around: https://www.heavybit.com/library/video/commercial-open-sourc...

It is not. They're better than most – and I know that's not a high bar, but they clear it by a wide margin. Nonetheless, their software is better described as "open core".

RedHat is not 100% open source either (although the differences are important).

I’d say it’s 99% open source. Do you have any significant example of non open source red hat software ?

Their OpenShift aaS offerings I would hazard to guess.

Opensource isnt such a problem the software should be great, i fail to see how Gitlab is better than Github.

Gitlab always felt like a set of checkboxes to appease non-technical managers. In my experience, most features are half-baked. Even the code review/MR experience is frustrating compared to GitHub. The UX for security scans is _really_ rough.

GitLab's integrated CI came before GitHub actions and was super helpful.

It feels like at first, Gitlab was trying to build a few great features, which is how we got CI, but then they started instead to focus on breadth, and that’s how we got everything else that’s now in the product.

GitLab CI is world-class.

What about the UX for security scans is rough?

Fully agree!

We tried it for a year and didn’t like it

GitHub has less features but the UX around PRs is 10x better IMO

I work for two clients (one of them is a huge German company) as a consultant who are both using GitLab simply because they can host it on their infrastructure. Makes it easier for them to satisfy internal security policies I guess.

What else would they use?

Atlassian Bitbucket for Git and TeamCity or Jenkins for build + deploy.

Github is a website while Gitlab is software.

Gitlab is both actually

Github is actually a web application, like Gitlab.

Can you download Github and host a private Github instance? No? Then its web-only. Like Google Docs is web-only, while MS Word is offline.

Gitlab is hostable software. You can buy and host Gitlab on your own servers, in private. That makes it a fundamentally different market than Github.

>Can you download Github and host a private Github instance?

Yes, that's what Github Enterprise Server is:

https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overv...

GitHub is Microsoft now.

Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.

Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage.

Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of needing to generate as much revenue as possible to satisfy their investors. Github is not in this position anymore.

> What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust?

Stop doing shady shit. The whole .NET Foundation kerfuffle from last week... Or concerns about how Copilot trains its data...

I like some of the open source work they do. It's nice that they opensourced LSP and built VSCode. I like some of the language research they do (their contributions to Haskell, Pony and F* more or less originated there, plus their mainstream languages) but can't shake the feeling that they only embraced open-source to get developers back on their side after losing out on mobile and much of the initial cloud rush.

Anyhow, I use some of their stuff, but I only trust the licenses, not the company. Not huge on having them lock me into a platform.

Like any big company, they have no ideology beyond making money. That actually makes it easy to trust them in a certain sense: they're not going to do things that don't benefit them, but they're not going to do something utterly crazy the way ideology-driven organizations can.

I agree that the main reason they're doing good things for developers is to get developers on board. But that doesn't negate that they're doing good things for developers.

But that's the whole problem with "trusting" microsoft. Their stated motto used to be "embrace, extend, extinguish". How do we know that has seriously changed on all levels?

I do not believe that Microsoft is fundamentally on board with the open source model. Its an alliance of convenience. If suddenly they think they can make more money some other way, they'll do that. They might not even actually destroy anything explicitly, merely ruin things out of indifference.

It's just business, nothing personal, no trust involved.

Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.

Open sourcing .NET under an Apache license was a great move. And so was making it cross platform. I surely missed C# my first few years without it.

Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.

How does that work with their patent threats? Eg against mono, gnome, tomtom(?) for using a Free implementation of the fat filesystem?

I haven't been following it but is all that renounced so it can't possibly come back or be applied to the next people?

My first reaction is "How do we know that releasing the code isn't just bait?"

> Open Source isn’t some weird religion where it only matters if you open source the stuff that makes you money.

Yet they love Open Source so much they use patents aggressively to extract resources from the Android project.

Don't believe all the BS made by the Microsoft PR.

Microsoft doesn't ask for trust, just minds its business.

And Azure being down means GitHub is down too.

> no open source company had ever been super successful...

I guess the trick is for it to also be a SaaS offering that no one wants to host themselves or whose moat isn't the time to write the code.

Yeah that seems to be the trick. If I only I knew then that that would be a successful business tactic. :)

Dont worry, as a corporate user, it's a nightmare: it wont last.

It’s really bloated but it’s gonna live and get better over time. Gitlab feels super slow compared to GitHub but it also has more features.

I’m personally extremely pro Source Hut but it’s not ready yet: https://sr.ht

Sourcehut will always be niche by definition.

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