Hacker News Reader

Comment by guybrush0123 | Hacker News Reader

> As CEO at New Relic, Staples’ strategic leadership and deep product knowledge significantly increased the company’s enterprise value. By accelerating revenue and driving increased profitability, he made New Relic one of the most broadly adopted platforms in its category. Staples has nearly 30 years of experience building developer platforms and serving developers as customers. Prior to New Relic, he spent many years at Microsoft and Adobe in executive leadership roles, building and scaling several multi-billion-dollar businesses.

On a burner account as I am a New Relic employee.

Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.

He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.

View on HN

Rumors are that Gitlab is for sale, so the move might make sense in that regard.

Time to jump ship to codeberg/gitea? What are non commercial git repos now days?

I'll wait to jump ship until I see who buys them. It could end up being a huge positive for a gitlab. I have been very disappointed in their strategy the past few years and I think they squandered an enormous opportunity and amount of Goodwill with developers. If they got bought by somebody good, then I think it could end up being a massive positive.

yeah, the product is great, but the pricing is a mess. If whoever buys it sorts that out it could be a win.

Microsoft buying GitHub seemed to be a huge benefit to GitHub at least.

GitHub was in an odd position; HR had politically captured every department. A buyout by someone so big was pretty much the only way to do it.

> HR had politically captured every department

Could you elaborate if you can?

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/follow-up-to-...

I used Gitlab at a previous job maybe four years ago and really liked the UI. Switching to Github at the new gig felt like a huge step backwards. That said, the product and business news I have seen regarding Gitlab since then has almost all been negative. Hopefully they are able to turn things around because at one point I really hoped they would overtake Github and thought it might happen.

Forgejo jumps to mind.

Gitea became for profit, there's still a non profit fork called Forgejo which has become fairly popular

To elaborate a bit more; first things first - Gitea is still MIT and open source. Not open core, full open source.

The main reason for Forgejo is moreso that Gitea as a project was taken over by a company instead of being run as a non-profit. Some of the dev team felt uncomfortable with that and forked it.

Personally I haven't seen much reason to switch from Gitea to Forgejo - this is the sort of ideological issue that I'd rather kick the can down the road on until Gitea Ltd goes bad (and in an assumption of good faith, I'll assume that it won't.)

It's not that difficult to move git repositories around after all.

The ideological difference between the two projects really shows on their landing pages. Forgejo has a cute fox drawn by a real artist whose name is credited in the website's footer; Gitea has AI-generated images of a robot in the clouds or in a skyline (it becomes really obvious when you look close)

Indeed. And the cute fox almost doesn't need the credits. When you recognize David Revoy's style on a project page, you know the project is probably a community-driven effort, and is worth checking out if you value that.

Thank you for sharing this. It make a huge difference for when we are choosing!

Does anyone know why gitea is developed on GitHub?

See this issue: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

For years, "self-hosting" Gitea wasn't done because it was missing a bunch of useful collaboration features. Now, it looks like that gap has been closed. All of the specific features mentioned in that issue seem to have been fixed, and the big remaining task is figuring out below to actually migrate all the existing data out of GitHub -- which doesn't seem to be super high on the priority list.

Who would buy it?

Microsoft :)

Won’t be allowed ? They already own GitHub

Would make no sense. They already own the most popular service, owning the second one may bring monopoly scrutiny.

Maybe IBM since I think Gnome and a few other large projects moved there. Plus since AI is all the rage, I can see someone picking it up.

The main question is probably the price.

I was thinking about that as well, given that it seems it would fit in well with the red hat portfolio. They don't as far as I know. Have a good answer for a gitforge, and the phenomenal CI CD offering that gitlab has would be very marketable to Red hat customers.

I would be excited if IBM acquired them and put them under the red hat umbrella, because as history has shown, it may mean that gitlab ends up becoming much more open. They may open up the entire product instead of doing the open core model.

Please correct me if wrong. Red Hat has OpenShift Cloud, which I think has Git repo hosting, including CI/CD.

Many options , older companies like IBM, Google, SAP, Oracle or even Salesforce (already own heroku in dev tooling space so not far fetched ) with stable or slowing market presence in engineering departments

Mid sized newer companies likes Hashicorp or datadog or vercel who target developers as customers .

Gitlab gives access to a large audience of developers to cross sell most dev tools so all these orgs can get a lot of returns paying more than the standalone value of gitlab itself.

The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave

Did I miss something? Didn't IBM acquire Hashicorp?

Yes they did, i should have clarified, as IBM is becoming like Broadcom as an umbrella organization for all sorts of companies, the ibm core is different beast than some of the acquisitions they have been making

In my mind just like LinkedIn , GitHub and Microsoft are every distinct entities with a lot of differences on how they work , Hashicorp and IBM parent are different and will remain so. Integrating into Hashicorp for Gitlab would be very different than integrating into IBM core with different values for both businesses .

GitLab Premium already integrates with HashiCorp Vault [1]

GitLab supports storing the Terraform state and includes Terraform templates however they are moving to OpenTofu in 18.x [2]

1. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/secrets/hashicorp_vault.html 2. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/deprecations.html

I wasn't thinking about a few focused features or integrations, but more generally. i.e non product things like sales and license packaging and son on.

If an acquisition has to make sense there should be a clear path to monetize it, for IBM core or its HashiCorp unit or any other buyer that will not just be through some light integrations alone, they can achieved with partnerships after all you don't need to buy the organization for it.

Agree. What did you have in mind? The two products are already lightly integrated.

> The best fit would be companies like Hashicorp who have strong open source pedigree so users won’t be turned off and leave

HashiCorp might not be the best fit anymore. Last year, they switched to a license that isn't open source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37081306

Salesforce let Heroku wither and die. I don't see them sticking their toes into the dev tooling space again anytime soon.

Google should do it. If some CorpDev of theirs are listening. This could be their Satya Nadella <> GitHib moment to bring back the lost shine.

This makes a lot of sense, and is truly frightening.

Google isn't know for its hands-off approach nor long term view for service growths. Gitlab is essential to balance Github's impact, I'd hate it to go in the graveyard.

The official rumor is DataDog:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/google-backed-software...

Given New Relic is a direct competitor, Bill Staples' background makes even more sense.

Why? And why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?

I seriously don't understand the deals being made in tech. Most of the makes no sense, not even retrospectively. I get Microsoft buying Github, that was a part of their open source strategy and they've always put a high value on developers.

> why would Gitlab be worth $8billion?

I wouldn't buy them for that myself, but Gitlab made $200 million in revenue in Q3 2024 [1]. So $800 million a year in revenue.

I've seen worse purchases.

[1] https://ir.gitlab.com/news/news-details/2024/GitLab-Reports-...

The way the present their numbers is pretty hard to understand, at least for me, did they lose $28million or make $28million in that same quarter? Either way that seems insanely low, if they're expected to be worth $8billion. The gap between profit and revenue seems to high.

There might be some potential for Gitlab complement your other business, in which case you may not see the lack of profit as that big of an issue. The problem is that if you can't make those $8billions back in future profit, then you're going to start making changes to the Gitlab offerings until they do become profitable.

That might be what the new CEO is suppose to do, pump up those numbers, and make it look like a sane investment.

Atlassian?

They have Bitbucket already.

Most of these sales aren't about acquiring a product but about acquiring a customer base, so it would make perfect sense for Atlassian IMHO.

I think its right time for AWS to buy.

AWS shut down their service, if AWS can "easily" integrate with Gitlab, I see a lot of potential on the deployment side to increase AWS revenue.

I sincerely hope it's not Broadcom. A 10x price increase would scare away a lot of customers.

Yes, I heard this rumor right after I moved from github to gitlab. Well if I have to go elsewhere at least gitlab will archive my abandoned free account for me :)

FWIW, I found them easier to deal wit than github, so will hang tight to see how this plays out.

I’m curious why you would move to Gitlab.

Nothing they’ve done since they were created has ever moved them in a more open source friendly direction, and they’ve broken a ton of promises both implicit and explicit along the way.

GitHub OTOH has only become more open source friendly (minus the AI stuff, but I suspect Gitlab is no better on that front).

In my experience, Gitlab is a lot more stable than Github. My last job was on Github, and we had an outage a couple times a month at least. We even had a Slack emote for it! My current job is on Gitlab, and we haven’t had a single outage in the year that we’ve been on them.

Second that. My job before last moved to a locally hosted enterprise Github instance, which promptly ate itself. The specs required to run it were also impressive, something like 64gb minimum to boot but more was strongly recommended.

Haha, I keep getting burned by GitHub outages even as a private contributor with my personal account... speaking of which, I expect one outage soon, this week so far it has been available always when I needed it...

What are you referring to?

Gitlab is open core, (not great but better than nothing) while github is zero open source.

You can't self host Github.

You can (Github Enterprise)!

If you're brave!

One feature area where Gitlab is still better for realworld stuff is CI (Gitlab CI vs Github Actions). Yes, you can do most things on both, but Gitlab CI makes a lot more sense.

In general, Github still feels like it's built for hobby coders (focusing on simplicity instead of configurability - which doesn't have to be a bad thing) while Gitlab feels like it's built for professional teams from the ground up.

I have used Gitlab CI basically daily for over 5 years and it makes sense. I would need to think hard to come up with something that seems fundamentally wrong.

I have never used Github Actions. Can you explain or give some examples what doesn't make sense?

Try and test a Github Action locally - it's an engineering project up there with the Space Shuttle. Repositories around the world are filled with endless commits of "test1", "test2", "test3" trying to debug their actions in prod.

That particular issue also exists in GitLab. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues/2797

Right, but Gitlab does have the excellent built-in pipeline editor that will visualize and validate your pipelines for you.

It can also render the complete pipeline config (making it easy to run and debug the problematic parts locally just by copying the relevant parts, even if they're hidden in and include somewhere).

IIRC Github Actions started as a 'visual editor' where you would drop and arrange 'Actions' and define the data flow between actions, but what most people want from a CI system is just a script/config file in their git repo which defines what command line tools to run, and to group those commands in jobs dependending on each other so that some jobs can run in parallel (which Github Actions only implemented as an afterthought after users demanded it).

To reuse code, Gitlab CI has simple template files which you can import into your toplevel .gitlab-ci.yml, and you have an inheritance system to derive new jobs from other jobs. That's a very simple and powerful system.

Code reuse in Github works with above mentioned 'actions' where each action seems to be a whole repository of stuff instead of a single file like in Gitlab CI.

Gitlab CI seems to be designed by people who know what they do and what their users need, while Github Actions seems to be designed by architecture astronauts, and has only afterwards and reluctantly been hammered into a shape where it does the things most users expect.

GitHub Actions feels like it was first designed to let people customize the GitHub Pages deploy flow (since GitHub by default only offered Jekyll as a static site generator, and Jekyll is Ruby tooling and not lightweight to run at all) and as a CI tool second, being molded into behaving like one after Travis CI went bad for open source projects.

Gitlab CI actually seems like it was made for CI in the first place.

GitHub Actions is rebranded Microsoft Azure product AFAIK

I'm pretty sure of the same, and that feature actually leaks into the implementation. Right after the initial introduction of the current Github Actions, we translated some Azure Devops scripts to Actions and a lot of the structure and most keywords where nearly identical. As well as the interface when running the CI.

If I remember correctly GitHub CI is pretty much a straight port of Microsoft’s existing Azure DevOps CI, done pretty soon after the acquisition. The rest of Azure DevOps UX is kinda insane so it’s no surprise the CI is a bit of a pain too.

And Github Actions is somehow superior to CircleCI in many ways!

Understanding how tokens get passed around. The pattern in Gitlab seems to be much more explicit.

Protected branches and associated secrets. Much cleaner construct on gitlab.

GitHub actions defacto seems to be tracing yaml to compiled JavaScript to hopefully that right source to shell commands.

Gitlab seems to be yaml to shell commands.

Nested projects. Nice midspot between monorepo and access control management.

API. I may be out of date on it but I recall the gitlab apis as pretty sensible. The github apis for administration has a very odd rest/graphql split.

I find them both equally bad just in different ways.

Compare the gitlab UI with phabricator for example. The workflows are mostly a strange mixture of whatever github made up on the back of a napkin and Stakeholder-consultant slop.

GitLab has accepted my patches…do you have a timeline for when Github will do the same? Sure, maybe the directions are different, but the baselines couldn't be more different either.

I recently had a GitHub patch accepted: https://github.com/primer/css/pull/2680

Neat…though considering how far removed it is from the actual behaviors of the forge rather than things that are essentially "bikeshed topics", I'm still not very convinced that Github is even in the same league as GitLab in "OSS friendliness".

I may be biased, but one of the reasons probably is that it's not Microsoft.

GitHub is open source friendly on paper, but almost nothing they do is actually open source, or even source available. Contrast that to GitLab who are actually open core, and the vast majority of their software if publicly available for free with a very permissive license.

One talks about open source because it's the de facto home of open source. The other is actually open source.

I'm curious, why did you make such a move? Seems like it would be way better to work for Github and then try to bounce to somewhere inside MS instead.

I'm pretty sure GP is referring to moving between GitHub and GitLab as repository hosts, not as employers.

How does this make sense? Gitlab is a public company, it's already for sale to anyone.

A lot more goes into selling a company or a controlling share. All the ducks in a row and the company really needs to prove that it is worth X price.

Gitlab is a publicly traded company, it’s literally been for sale to anyone who wants it for 3 years.

If you made an offer to buy it for ~$15B right now, the board would basically have to approve the sale.

GitLab doesn't really make sense as an independent company.

Horrific outcomes: Atlassian, Oracle, or IBM buys it.

Great outcomes: Google, Amazon, or JetBrains ($7B private valuation) buys it.

Eh, Google it goes to the graveyard (rip Google code), Amazon it gets buried, JetBrains would be cool tho.

Better comparison for Google would be YouTube.

Yes but that’s also pre-Sundar Google when there was some semblance of vision. Now that Ruth runs the company behind the scenes with a vision timeline that is measured in exactly 3 month increments…well, good luck.

Some of Google's best business units were acquisitions.

YouTube, Google Maps/Earth, Android, DoubeClick, DeepMind, Firebase, HTC (Pixel)

Don't discount Google's M&A game.

They kill more than they allow to live, and doubleclick slowly hollowed out Google search by skewing incentives away from great content to maximizing display revenue via link bait.

Doubleclick is to Google what McDonald Douglas’s is to Boeing.

Don’t forget Docs (Wordly)

Are any of those from the last decade? They acquired them when they were a different company.

Amazon has an okay but underwhelming developer suite. If they bought Gitlab and did nothing other than say that they should have first class support for AWS deployments it’d be a good move, and that’s before you consider things like pivoting Gitlab’s struggling AI tools to theirs or aligning all of the supply-chain stuff big companies want.

CodeBuild asks so much and gives so little.

CodeCommit is on the way out, onboarding was disabled over the summer.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/how-to-migrate-your-aws-...

I wouldn't consign it to the graveyard that quickly.

It's a lot easier/more common for Google to kill internal projects and small acquisitions.

A $16B write-down is far less likely, especially when many Googlers internally realize how much a threat Microsoft is with GitHub + VS Code.

JetBrains buying it would be out of left field but makes sense in some sense and would be the best possible outcome.

I'm not sure if Jetbrains is bigger than I expected or Gitlab smaller, but it feels to me that Jetbrains wouldn't be able to afford Gitlab.

It would be roughly a merger of equals (1-2 billion either direction), and I'm not sure how that could be financed without JetBrains giving up too much control over their own existing company. Perhaps a bank could extend a private loan if they believed in JetBrains ability to use the merger to grow both sides of the merged company.

Gitlab is worth $10B on the public market right now without an acquisition premium. You're very far.

Ah wow, my apologies. I didn’t realize it was publicly traded! I used very inappropriate sources for that valuation…most likely super outdated without realizing it.

Jetbrains decided to go from the Space product to a cut down Space Code product with just code review and git hosting, but then this last week announced they will be shuttering even that next year. I doubt they want to get back into the git hosting, if they did by buying GitLab, that would be odd.

I certainly agree that a horrible outcome would be if atlassian or Oracle buys it, but IBM? If IBM acquires and puts it under the red hat umbrella, they have a history of opening up products that were previously more closed. Considering what they did with ansible, for example, would be amazing for gitlab.

> If IBM acquires and puts it under the red hat umbrella, they have a history of opening up products that were previously more closed.

As a former CentOS user, I politely disagree with this.

I appreciate the politeness :-)

Good point, red hat is far from perfect. The way they handled cent was incredibly disappointing.

Atlassian has their own Cloud offerings and their data center versions of Jira, BitBucket and Confluence are very good.

I don’t see GitLab replacing BitBucket.

They’ve been pushing customers to their cloud versions pretty hard and holding back features. Jira and Confluence are decent but BitBucket is like time-traveling back to 2010. We migrated to GitLab with unanimous enthusiasm – so many new features, so many things worked better - and that decision felt better as the years passed where we’d get “is anyone working on this?” updates on the Atlassian tickets for missing BitBucket features which had been years old when I’d voted for them.

Our developers want GitLab because it means replacing Bamboo which is an OK product but we have hundreds of build agents that don’t scale for on prem. Each agent is a VM running on VMWare. The pipeline’s are so much better.

But GitLab price annually for the same amount of users that we have for Bamboo and BitBucket is higher in licensing fees. We have to do things self hosted because of regulatory and compliance reasons.

There is probably a business case to be made for the inefficiency that we see with Bamboo.

BitBucket DC is pretty solid and never goes down. It integrates well with all the other Atlassian products like Jira or Confluence. Our instance is also highly available and fault tolerant.

Jetbrains already has TeamCity and Youtrack

They also had Space (discontinued in May) and Space Code (discontinued last week). I don't think GitLab makes much sense for them

Why would Google want it? They shutdown Google code and Amazon is shutting down CodeCommit.

I think it would make more sense for a number of companies to invest in Gitlab, to ensure that there is a 3rd. party tool available, as to not "force" users into the hands of Github and Microsoft.

That's probably the best case, Google, Amazon, IBM, JetBrains and a few others create a company, with themselves on the board, and tasks that company with buying and running Gitlab. Having Google alone buy it and you may as well just migrate now pending the inevitable disinterest and shutdown. So I guess that I disagree, Gitlab makes more sense as an independent company, that it does as part of companies that already had failed competing products.

My guess is the ever popular MicroFocus (Now OpenText) who will buy everything that it on the edge of popularity.

What needs to be done to prepare it for sale?

Slash costs/headcount in short term, sell, pocket the cash and get the hell out of dodge.

Not necessarily. If you want the best price for the company, you might want to grow it before you sell it.

New Relic went through a few reorgs during his tenure, but they didn't freeze hiring until after the sale.

Fair, hopefully the gitlab employees won’t get totally screwed!

They hired an axe man, people are getting hurt.

Produce attractive numbers. Often by cutting costs.

There are plenty of due-diligence internal things that need to be put in order to make your company attractive. Processes, documentation, compliance, etc.

Then there are things like having roadmaps for the future to make you look attractive.

Then there are vulture things to make your numbers look good which can range from doing neglected cleanups of actually unnecessary costs to cutting costs in ways that really suck for customers and employees.

Aside from things mentioned by others: Having a network to potential buyers.

> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.

I think a lot of people would say this is not true. I worked with Bill a little at Microsoft, where he ran an x,000-person engineering org, and my experience was that he was a competent, detail-oriented, product-focused leader. You might disagree but, in any event, running an x,000-person org in a large tech company does qualify you for CEO positions, at least in the eyes of people who make those decisions.

Yeah that's pretty relevant tech experience.

Not sure how much more relevant you can get....

He was fired from the same org. Several of his direct reports were also fired. He spent years trying to cover up major mistakes and oversights, and finally got caught red handed without anyone left to scapegoat. It wasn’t to an Elizabeth Holmes level, but he wasn’t that far away either.

This isn’t secondhand either. I witnessed him multiple times telling reports to bury findings, stop research that made the product look bad, and actively prevent anyone from going over his head to higher leadership.

What a shame. A literal hatchet man

Not necessarily. In my experience, getting the right person to prepare a company for an IPO or a sale is hard. Most buyers will do due diligence and besides 'slashing costs' and 'growing the company', there is a skill set for getting governance and compliance practices in place and as well as leading the roadshow for the sale which has some similarities to raising private capital. For instance, if you don't already have explicit policies for workplace safety and environmental practices (e.g. what do you recycle, water usage, etc), you will usually need to put these in place. (We invested in manufacturing and these were extremely important to us). If you are located in multiple jurisdictions, you need to be ready to demonstrate that you are in compliance with local regulations and pass the equivalent of "integration tests", prove you are in compliance across multiple jurisdictions where their rules may differ or seem to conflict. The CEO knows what needs to get done and has the rolodex to get the people to help the company get these things done for a sale because he has done this several times before and understands the things that can go wrong.

    Bill Staples was a nice enough guy, but at New Relic he was specifically brought in as CEO to get the company prepared to be sold. Which is the exact same thing he did at Marketo before that.
    He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.

So he essentially functioned as a company’s bill-staples for its assets?

That was my immediate thought. Congrats to gitlab

> He has no relevant tech experience, except when it comes to preparing a company to be sold in the next 2-3 years.

So other than his relevant experience he has not relevant experience?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com