Community Contribution at GitLab | Hacker News Reader

Community Contribution at GitLab

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62 pointsgtsiolis33 comments

GitLab team member here (https://gitlab.com/nick_vh)

It's amazing to see how all our resources have been put together to create such an exhaustive reflection of our culture & values. Thank you for doing that GarethX.

GitLab's dual flywheel strategy [0] reinforces our open source growth strategy [1]

For those interested, you can learn about GitLab's stewardship promises in our handbook [2] and inspect the Git history for changes transparently (right corner - view page source - GitLab repository view - History)

[0] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/strategy/#dual-...

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/open-source/gr...

[2] https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/stewardship/#pr...

Does GitLab still endorse abusive employment practices like limiting salary by geographic region?

No horse in the non-globally-competitive race, just amusingly regressive to see.

For some reason I keep getting job offers from Gitlab and that salary nonsense is always a hard pass. Whatever do they get off reaching into my private life like that. That isn’t the only thing in their handbook that makes me go hmmm and all in it doesn’t come across as a place id like to work or a leadership team I would respect.

Private life? Could you elaborate?

Where I live is a private decision. That should have zero influence on how much they pay me. To me, that comes across as “we will determine your standard of living” and that is incredibly toxic.

Do you think location based pay aligns with Gitlab's values?

I have no horse in the race, but I think the answer is "no" but sometimes it makes sense to diverge from a value if the alternative represents an existential threat. I do not believe GitLab is profitable enough to do this satisfactorily.

If a business can't sustainably operate by strictly adhering to their values, is the business sustainable or are the values broken? Is it all a fool's errand? I don't know. It doesn't seem worth closing the book on GitLab for.

(I don't know the details but my impression is that GitLab feels very pressured to minmax their monetization strategy to be able to compete with GitHub. I don't see a viable alternative for them. If they're super profitable and I'm talking out of my ass, let me know.)

Heres another link on this same topic, their commitment to “transparency by default” https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/security/transparency-b... Honestly it’s really admirable and I have nothing bad to say about them.

If you have nothing negative to say then why say anything at all

Its like how a dearth of negativity is a positive thing

Friend = Enemy(Enemy)

There are multiple issues with GitLab as a company. They pay their staff based on location and not the output of their work which is in direct contradiction of their values of "Results" and "Diversity, Inclusivity and Belonging".

And how the location factors are decided is not shared with the staff, just vague hand waving of industry averages. This again is again in contradiction with their "transparency" value.

I can point out a lot more things. They might be transparent, but are not above exploiting folks from weaker economies.

> An unexpected benefit of community was shown in its role in avoiding a PR disaster. In January 2017, a database administrator (referred to as "team-member-1")

Small nitpick/pedantics: the person in question wasn't a database administrator, or a junior developer as some sites reported at the time. They were a senior developer that happened to be part of a (too) small database focused team.

Ah, thanks - will get that fixed up shortly.

Still pissed they dropped their Starter licensing tier. It had all the features above the free version that we needed and cost (I think) $4/user/month.

Then they dropped that tier and forced us to move to the next tier up which was $19/user/month (now $29 it seems?) and filled with features we don't need or want.

Needless to say we're currently in the process of moving to an alternative.

They weren’t making any money (and still aren’t profitable) at $4 a user.

while producing "features we don't need or want"

The pricing was the same for self-hosted installs...

What alternative are you moving to? What features does this alternative have?

Just curious, why not just self-host if you are worried about pricing? It is pretty easy and you have full control.

We do self-host but features are still gated behind licensing.

I absolutely understand that why you don’t like the price implications.

I am curious however what features you don’t want/need in the other tier

I wanted to add scanning for my single person hobby projects and was willing to pay. I immediately lost interest when I saw their pricing ($99/mo).

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

Great collection of things happening at GitLab around community contributions.

Thanks for sharing George, much appreciated!

“Initially derided as a GitHub clone…” I mean, let’s not kid ourselves, it still is. But so is Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, Bitbucket, etc. I appreciate that there are only so many ways you can do a web-based software forge, but most of the design cues and UX established by GitHub have been adopted by the other products in this space.

I’m not arguing whether this is a good or a bad thing—familiarity leads to productivity, of course—but in my opinion GitLab really does derive a lot of its success in being a “GitHub clone”.

in a lot of areas gitlab is better or has more features than GitHub. clone very much under sells gitlab. integrated CI like 5 years before GitHub actions and the issue and repo management is still far superior IMO

I still think we'll see GitLab go source available/BSL within the next year or two.

Can you explain a little more about why you think that?

I’m likely wrong here, but I was under the impression that companies start adopting the BSL when they notice their OSS product is being forked and used by other companies for profit and they want to be able to capture that revenue. I think that makes a lot of sense for tools like Terraform and OSS DBs. I just didn’t get the impression that a lot of companies use GitLab in that way? Like, GitLab itself is already easy and free to use, and I don’t see anybody chomping at the bit looking to fork it and offer some SaaS product on top of it.

They are open-core, not all their features are open source. No need for them to go BSL.

Yeah they could start eating the core, but my experience has been the opposite.

They are already facing fierce competition fron Gitea and sourcehut. If they start taking toys away from big open source instances like Debian, GNOME, Free desktop, et cetera, the community will migrate.

Reads like a paid promotion if you ask me, and my god is the background of that website, as well as the whole dot matrix aesthetic not sickening. My eyes struggled to focus on the text without it becoming a blurred mess that appeared to be in constant motion.

I can confirm that it's not a paid promotion. Just my reflections on what I see as being exemplary community work.

Sorry to hear you found reading the article difficult. It's an aesthetic choice I've received only positive comments about before this, but I'll look into providing some option to disable it - perhaps I could hook into the prefers-reduced-motion option or similar.

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