Do they? Are they backed by capital pushing for an “Exit”, and even if so, couldn’t an IPO be a viable option?

They’ve taken a big pile of VC funding, so the answer to your first question is yes.

Meanwhile, the biggest player (by far) in the market just abandoned dreams of an IPO. Gitlab is a distant third place in that market, and has a revenue model that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”

IPOs are only viable if you have a business capable of supporting them.

There are only two possibilities I see: acquired by Atlassian and merged with Bitbucket, or by a low-tier cloud player with deep pockets such as Aliyun or Oracle. The IPO market just isn’t that buoyant at the moment.

Oracle has been looking at GitLab since the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub.

Is Gitlab a distant third? I didn’t know if they are in second place or not. But distant seems too much. Is Bitbucket in second place? Any numbers or references you have?

> ... that is best described as “like Github, but cheaper.”

Aha, I thought I may find you on this thread, once again pushing the same line.

how active are those users and repositories? both of these statistics are meaningless without additional context

FWIW, Gitlab would prefer an IPO and they say they are on track for it.

Source: Gitlab guy in one of the many, many, many Gitlab or Github threads recently.

Everyone says they’d prefer an IPO but a lot of them change their minds when a man puts a $7.5 billion check on the table.

Gitlab isn’t going to say no to $7.5B or any number close to that. They are also more venture backed compared to GitHub.