”can something be non-profitable for a decade and still be called a business?”

This is such a bizarre talking point...do you honestly believe that Gitlab is a better business? Their model is “just like Github, but with even more stuff given away for free!” And let’s not forget that Github has to compete with Gitlab cannibalizing the low end of the market. I’m sure that hurts margins.

Someone has to pay those Gitlab engineers who are writing the bulk of the code. At the very least, as soon as the dumb money dries up, the velocity of development on Gitlab will drop like a rock. In the worst case, you’ll get an conflicted corporate hydra, like mysql.

You write:

> You can’t build a business competing with someone who is using VC money to give away their product.

This is delightfully worded, given it could apply to both github and gitlab.

Remembering that github started in 2008, while gitlab.com started four years later (first commit to their codebase was 2011).

Github is running on $350m of VC funding.

In response to my question 'can you call a 10yo company that still isn't profitable, a "business"?', you avoided the question, called the matter bizarre, and tried to distract from the question by claiming github is a _better_ business.

Your claim that github has 'built a business and .. gave back generously' is also weird in that gitlab has released the source to their core product, but github hasn't. This also speaks against your claim that you're more likely to be abandoned if you commit to gitlab than github.

Finally, the idea that the 'low end of the market' is where all the money is does not match any other tech startup's experience, is belied by the pricing structure of both companies, and further invalidated by the fact that gitlab is not swimming in cash from their cornering of the frugal user segment.

And what that means is, yeah, either they keep burning $$$ every month and selling more of the control to VCs to feed the war chest until they maybe buy 2nd place, find an acquirer (and with that much ever-increasing VC control, a likely push), or yeah, layoffs will happen. Gitlab is extra interesting because their definition of innovation is biting off even more surface area (e.g., CI), and therefore even more burn.

Keep in mind.. all this says zero about how nice the product quality is or how friendly the people are. But just in the same way you don't get mad at what happens if you stick your hand in a lawn mower (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=34m7s) ... there are financial forces at play from being a high-spending bottom feeder that are hard to escape. Possible, and I wish them luck, but that's a real bet.

>Keep in mind.. all this says zero about how nice the product quality is or how friendly the people are.

Then don't use the term bottom feeder since that means the people are making a shitty product with no ethics to really innovate. It says the people are shameful hacks and the quality of the product is bad.

In reality Gitlab is a better product and the people involved should be proud of their work.

Based on that, having 275+ employees, and their stated IPO targets, I ran the numbers recently. My guess was their costs are ~$40M year (admirable: I expected way higher but they focus on non-US hires and pay only 50% percentile in _local_ markets: super low!). Likewise, their stated IPO and growth targets make me guess they make ~$20M/yr. So two different reasons to believe they're burning... ~$20M/yr. The positive thing for them, which they're not public about but I'd guess, is while they're probably growing OK in regular accounts (hard competition vs bitbucket, github, etc.), they're probably Super Great on retention + internal expansion, so net negative churn, compounding factors, etc. I think they _can_ stop hiring and let revenue catch up, though other forces take hold then: so it does look like they're on the classic growth-over-control VC treadmill (despite saying they're not), and will keep ceding control to VCs.

https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/#sequence-

""" During phase 2 there is a natural inclination to focus only on on-premises since we make all our money there. Having GitHub focus on SaaS instead of on-premises gave us a great opportunity to achieve phase 1. But GitHub was not wrong, they were early. When everyone was focused on video on demand Netflix focused on shipping DVD's by mail. Not because it was the future but because it was the biggest market. The biggest mistake they could have made was to stick with DVDs. Instead they leveraged the revenue generated with the DVDs to build the best video on demand service. """

No label is ever 100% accurate, but a lot of that dynamic has played out here pretty clearly..

Gitlab is also running on a bunch of VC money.

> In response to my question 'can you call a 10yo company that still isn't profitable, a "business"?'

Gitlab also likely runs at a loss. Gitlab has certainly never claimed to be profitable and some estimates are that as few as .1% of their customers pay for Gitlab.

> I understand that you're claiming gitlab is salting the earth, but still don't understand why / how.

It's pretty clear to me at least that neither Github nor Gitlab have sustainable business models. The OSS community is crazy to think that either business will continue to subsidize OSS development while losing millions of dollars a year. All of the anger against Github and the new "faith" in Gitlab is pure delusion. Both these companies subsidize OSS development while losing millions of dollars. This will go on until it stops. It certainly can't go on forever.

Personally I suspect the absolutely best thing to happen to both Github and Gitlab would be being bought out by real companies that heavily depend upon OSS and, you know, actually make money.

It came up before and now the chatter has started up again around Gitlab. I think it still makes a lot of sense for AWS to purchase Gitlab. There's a fundamental strategy alignment there (both Gitlab and Amazon aim to be a "one stop shop"), Gitlab offers the potential to lure a bunch of developers into the AWS platform with a free offering and, ultimately, Gitlab offers the same computational economics as other Amazon products because it is just another hosted product that requires a database. Wouldn't be surprised at all to see such a transaction in as little as 2-3 years.

That is what I said.

Uh...Gitlab is built upon libgit2, rugged and github-linguist. In other words, the core parts of Gitlab — the ones that interact with git are built, maintained and open-sourced by GitHub. And these are just the obvious dependencies. Github people contribute heavily to open-source projects that most Ruby websites use.

If you’re going to fanboy all over the place, fine, but at least know what you’re talking about when you do it. And don’t try to weasel out of it by talking about “core products” —- without GitHub’s substantial technical contributions to the infrastructural code that interacts with git, it’s a safe bet thst Gitlab wouldn’t exist. That’s core.

Originally you declared:

> If you want nice things, you have to pay for them.

And I don't know how that fits in with people releasing / maintaining free software.

I responded to your first rant because you appeared to be 'going all fanboy' over github, declaring them a successful, superior business. I asked you if a company that hadn't turned a profit despite first mover advantage and a decade of trying could be termed a business ... and you weaselled out of that question.

If you believe Github isn’t a business, then you’re going to be sorely disappointed by Gitlab, whose business model is worse.

I’m done talking to you now.

The challenge discussing this with you is all your comments about Github are based around comparing them (favourably) to Gitlab.

> I'm done talking to you now.

This is a shame, as I'm consumed with curiosity on your take of today's news that Microsoft spent US$7b buying github.

From what you've described it sounds like they should have just cloned libgit2, rugged, and github-linguist, and rattled up their own gitlab over the weekend.

But the damage is already done - people think MariaDB is some bastion of good intentions and open source software now, because they very rarely look deeper.

What?

There was strong precedent for fearing what may happen with MySQL. Knowledge of what happened to Hudson, OES, OpenOffice, Solaris ... this would concern the stewards of any bit of software that got swallowed up by Oracle.

(Edit: Also I recall some worrying stories coming out from Monty and other key developers.)

What's this 'bullshit licence' that MariaDB has? I thought the source was (L)GPL all the way down?

This is like a scavenger hunt.

I've looked up MariaDB MaxScale ... and found an optional / add-on product that is aimed at Enterprises, seems to require an Enterprise support licence for the Enterprise edition of MariaDB ... and I completely fail to see how any of this demonstrates that the 'MariaDB story is a bit of a fuck you'.

Basically - their formerly GPL proxy for doing HA deployments is suddenly not open source.

They can of course make this decision - it's their code to do with as they wish. But it's quite fucking rich for Monty to claim Oracle will close source MySQL, create a fork and company which then uses that fear to grow in popularity, only to do the very thing he accused oracle of doing: closing an open source product.

Edit:

Also, if you think only "enterprise" customers need database clusters that survive individual node's being offline, you're in for a big shock.

Definitely not the most extraordinary story over the last decade.

And trumped by IBM's famous first $1b spend on 'Linux' just shy of twenty years ago, and their subsequent announcement that they'd recouped that money within a year.

Coincidentally this speaks to your claim:

> This is likely the greatest act of charity the planet has ever known.

These guys aren't in it for the charity. There's doubtless plenty of positive PR spin from contributing to free software -- but don't mistake pragmatism or happenstance for altruism.

And IBM's contribution was, frankly, marketing. It does not compare to the volumes of high quality technology that the companies I mentioned have simply given away for free.

Many on HN and others are perhaps too close to it but I think people will look back upon this extraordinary corporate charity as a decisive event of the century.

I think you're being overly charitable to think these tech corporations had charitable intentions when they contributed resources to tech projects that happened to improve their tech business prospects.

> And IBM's contribution was, frankly, marketing. It does not compare to the volumes of high quality technology that the companies I mentioned have simply given away for free.

Bizarre you didn't mention that up front when you named 'the big five contributors'.

On what do you base your bold claim that IBM's contribution was marketing, and the other corporations weren't?

> Many on HN and others are perhaps too close to it but I think people will look back upon this extraordinary corporate charity as a decisive event of the century.

IBM announced their first billion spend last century.

Just ask Amazon

Maybe, we should ask ourselves first if it's a fair comparison. Amazon kept investing the profits into themselves. I don't think that is the case with Github though