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Comment by altdataseller | Hacker News Reader

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.

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