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Comment by ngoldbaum | Hacker News Reader

Kallithea is community developed under a GPL v3 license. There is no corporate entity primarily in charge of Kallithea development, and there is no for-pay enterprise edition.

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Just wanted to add that in principle the GitLab core team is in charge of GitLab development https://about.gitlab.com/core-team/ It is a bit theoretical since many core team members do work for GitLab B.V. (of which I'm CEO). By the way, does Kallithea have any features that are in GitLab Enterprise Edition but not in GitLab Community Edition?

I somehow get the feeling that all you do is shilling for GitLab on HN.

Hi rtz12, I try to be informative and listen to fellow commenters. I'm sorry to hear that you perceive it as you do. My impression was that the quote 'corporate entity primarily in charge of Kallithea development' was a reference to GitLab as it is the largest (and only?) open source product in this category with a corporate entity. I wanted to make sure everyone knew about the role of the core team. As the CEO I think about GitLab a lot and I try to be present everywhere it is discussed on the internet. Coincidentally my last comment on HN was on an article about Twitter without any comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9361159 But I certainly comment about it a lot of HN. Actually our company got started by a Ask HN post.

Hi sytse,

don't worry, they are just meaning us (the RhodeCode company which was co-founded by Marcin, the creator of RhodeCode, and me).

The Kallithea project members have their own thoughts how professional enterprise software should be developed, tested and maintained for a massive scale and they do not think that a company or full-time employees should be involved.

They forked our old 1.7.2 version from 2 year ago.

It is good that successful open source projects are forked, it increases diversity and choice for all the different user segments and generally drives innovation forward.

RhodeCode Enterprise 3, https://rhodecode.com, is a significant improvement to our old forked versions (in terms of performance, security, workflows and VCS support) and the user can select now if he wants to go more for a hobby open source fork project or a commercially backed, professional software product like Gitlab or RhodeCode.

I wish all the best to the Kallithea folks even if it seems that their focus lays more on talking about why the project exists instead of working in the project itself and it is interesting to see how strongly the development paths already diverged.

Best,

Sebastian

Sebastian,

while you are bashing this project because of too much talk, I had a look at the Rhodecode site and couldn't really gather any information about the project at all. Maybe I'm dense, but as far as I can see

- there is no description of supported workflows (branch/commit/patch-based, how do you track rebases/force pushes, etc.)

- there is no link to actual documentation

- there is no demo

- and worst of all: your "Pricing" section does not mention any actual prices.

I know I can directly download your software and try myself, but this is something I only do when I'm confident your software could at least theoretically work for our setup and is also affordable.

> The Kallithea project members have their own thoughts how professional enterprise software should be developed, tested and maintained for a massive scale and they do not think that a company or full-time employees should be involved.

> They forked our old 1.7.2 version from 2 year ago.

You skipped to mention license violation claims: https://lwn.net/Articles/609709/

See also the discussion the last time this came up on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9193241

Hi Sebastian, thanks for the response, it makes a lot of sense that the comment referred to RhodeCode and not GitLab. I feel stupid for thinking otherwise, rtz12 is right that I'm a bit GitLab obsessed.

Is that argument supposed to be in favor of Kallithea? Because I don't see how it does, tbh.

Think of it in terms of free software identity politics, or free software deontological ethics. In these terms lack of a multi-stakeholder copyleft (or single stakeholder committed to free software) invites identity crisis or immoral behavior, and presence of an enterprise (ie proprietary) version is identity crisis and is immoral. Therefore in those terms, the argument you're replying to is in favor of Kallithea.

If you're not thinking in those terms, the argument you're replying to might seem irrelevant, or even in favor of Gitlab, if eg you prefer a permissive license or the software you use to have a profitable business behind it. Maybe that's where you're coming from?

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