Is the free (free as in beer, I'm not an open source zealot otherwise) Gitlab not just a part of the conversion funnel, eventually made unsustainable once growth plateaus?
There will always be an open source version of GitLab, more than 1000 people contributed and it the most popular self-hosted option, used on-premises by more than 100,000 organizations. They will keep going with the open source version, with our without GitLab Inc.
But the MySQL purchase by Sun and Oracle has shown what can happen to projects when the company is acquired. The best option we saw is to at least codify our promise to the rest of the community in https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship
When we break our promise it is time to fork.
Any suggestions are appreciated.
Other (unrelated) minor things:
- SAML support exists, but at last check was mostly broken. Universities in particular use SAML over OAuth (See http://www.incommonfederation.org/participants/)
- Resource usage seems very high for small shops; will there be a GitLab "lite"? ...would be especially awesome if it didn't need a mostly dedicated container and could drop in as a subfolder of an existing site (with minimal resource requirements).
Saml support should be pretty good, it was contributed by CERN and they use it in production. Please see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/saml.html for documentation. If you encounter a bug please create an issue on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
We will try to reduce memory usage by something like 20% in the coming year. We have package for the Raspberry Pi 2 if you're into that. But GitLab will always be large due to its many features. For more details see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst... If you want something with minimal requirements I recommend Gogs https://gogs.io/
(installation instructions) https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/#raspberrypi2
(original blog post) https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/21/gitlab-on-raspberry-pi-2...
I run our Shibboleth IDP among other things, and I was told by the team that was looking at GitLab at the time that it was impossible to tie it in with the currently available SAML SP plugins. This was over a year ago, maybe things have improved...
Actual question, do you have much Australian based business and do you see yourselves needing account managers there (here) in the near future?
We just hired our first person for APAC sales, Michael Alessio https://about.gitlab.com/team/
We don't have any open positions now but you can always shoot him a mail. michael@ company domain, please include a reference to this comment
> preserve our culture, mission and goals.
Pick one. Or is there a historic precedent I'm unaware of?
On a serious note, the shift in the latter parameters can be smaller than in an acquisition, but to "preserve" would imply actively managing employee (and founder) expectations in the build-up to IPO.