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echelon

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.

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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.

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 I used very inappropriate sources for that valuation…most likely super outdated without realizing it.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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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