My guess is yes.

Gitlab's Series D was $100 million dollars for a valuation of $1 billion; settled several months (Sept '18 [0]) after Microsoft announced their plan to purchase Github (June '18 [1]) and in the month before the Microsoft-Github transaction was settled (Oct '18 [2]).

If the pitch deck to investors didn't mention Microsoft buying Github, I would be surprised.

Of interest, looking at their pricing page[3], Gitlab lists CI minutes as the top differentiating item for each level. I wonder if that's a signal of how the market has responded to segmentation ... or if it's as simple as "it looks better".

Disclosure: I work for Pivotal. We compete at the fringes and I expect there will be more as Gitlab expands its product boundaries.

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/19/announcing-100m-series-d...

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/4/17422788/microsoft-github-...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-githu...

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

GitLab employee, actually our plan is to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy

There you go, I stand corrected.

Though nobody's plans survive contact with money and I would still bet on such a slide having been displayed.

I would think someone like.. maybe IBM?

Seems like it would fit better with IBM's (now) RedHat portfolio, than it would fit with Google.

Maybe I'm just being hopeful...

IBM would make more sense than Google. Despite the topic of TFA, almost all of GitLab's ARR comes from their on-prem offering not their SaaS offering. IBM is much better positioned to sell and support on-prem software than Google. IBM is also a long-time player in SCM, and despite being legacy their Rational products still have a big footprint in enterprise. With some integrations and migration tools an IBM-owned GitLab would have a huge installed base to go sell Git modernization to.

Another possibility would be Broadcom, as CA has a number of adjacent products for the software development lifecycle.

I'd put IBM and SAP as outside chances. The Red Hat purchase makes perfect sense for IBM: they're buying a competitor which has deep roots in the enterprise. Gitlab is less so.

On the other hand Google is in a struggle to catch up with even Azure, so Gitlab looks attractive as a foil against Github.

Oh god please no. I want to be using Gitlab 5 years from now, not planning a migration back to Github or whatever when Google loses interest in another toy.

If Google acquired GitLab, they'd offer it as a managed platform for GCP, which they're unlikely to shut down since contracts and SLA require a heads up of about a year before they can remove a service that is GA from their platform.

Just look at Google+: it still lives on for G-Suite customers while the public version has been shut down.

I don't expect GitLab to be of much interest to Google though: A lot of their stuff competes with services Google has on GCP, Ruby/Rails doesn't fit that well into their Python/Golang/Java stack and a remote-only company wouldn't fit into their office-bound culture.

The whole reason I picked Gitlab is that it doesn't matter what Gitlab does, if they pick a weird direction I can just self host and do what I want.

Gitlab is big enough that should they ever be killed by a Google acquisition (I don't think that's likely), a strong enough community would sprout and keep maintaining it.

Do you have examples of open source software in a similar situation (one company providing coordination and final approval in the previous project; similar complexity level to Gitlab, whatever that is), where that happened successfully?

I'm not challenging necessarily, I legitimately am interested in examples.

It depends on your definition of “kill”.

OpenSolaris -> Illumos

Hudson -> Jenkins

OpenOffice -> LibreOffice

MySQL -> MariaDB (not killed, but forked out of fear it would be)

And a non-Oracle example:

Node.js -> IO.js (arguable - forked because Node dev was stagnant, eventually merged)

All those had communities outside the main company long before they "moved out". What's the percentage of external contributors to GitLab? 1%?

Hmm what about the Blender project, would that one count?

I admit it's difficult to come up with examples, though I don't know of any failures either. RethinkDB has been sort of a failure, but it was never very popular to begin with.

GitHub can also be self-hosted: https://github.com/enterprise

You can't compare that as it's a paid enterprise on-prem version not something you can self-host and keep running as long as you want. You won't get community fixes for it like it would be the case if Google were to abandon Gitlab if an acquisition would be the case.

That’s not what “self-hosted” means.

Agreed! I’d drop Gitlab in a hot second or f they were acquired by Google.

If you told me 10 years ago I’d be way more interested in working with Microsoft than Google I wouldn’t have believed you.

Hi, GitLab employee! Don't worry, our plan is actually to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/

Hi, GitLab employee! Don't worry, our plan is actually to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/

But why (would google want to acquire GitLab)?

GitLab employee, nope! Our plan is to go public by November 18, 2020: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/

I certainly hope not, after using GitLab since day 1, I'd immediately start migrating customers off.

Hi, GitLab employee! Don't worry, our plan is actually to go public by 2020. Our strategy page is public: https://about.gitlab.com/company/strategy/