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Comment by sytse | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your question! We're a VC backed startup so we have to have a so called liquidity event at some point. As explained on https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ our goal is to IPO instead of being aquired. This will ensure we can preserve our culture, mission and goals.

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.

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> IPO

> 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.

I agree that as a company grows the culture will always change, there is no standing still. But we're very active in spreading and prioritizing our values. For information about our values please see https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/#values

What bullshit answer is this? It is pretty obvious you will have little to say compared to the majority shareholders

Thanks for the answer - very helpful!

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).

I'm glad to hear my answer was helpful.

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/

It's really nice to see you plug Gogs like that :) I'm a massive fan of both! They fill different niches I think. You're always super helpful here on HN, too, and I just wanted to let you know that I (and I'm sure others here) appreciate it!

Thanks! I agree they fill a different niche.

Huh? Looking at the GOGS documentation, it seems that only LDAP auth is upported?

You can also just setup accounts manually, w/o using external auth.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. Not sure why I got downvoted on that...

Info on the Raspberry Pi 2 distribution is here, if anyone else is interested:

(installation instructions) https://about.gitlab.com/downloads/#raspberrypi2

(original blog post) https://about.gitlab.com/2015/04/21/gitlab-on-raspberry-pi-2...

Thanks for adding the links!

We use Gitlab here at The Ohio State University. We authenticate via Shibboleth. So far it's worked pretty well.

Nice! Could you share some info? (Many variations of contact info in my profile).

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...

I think support for Shibboleth was added on Aug 28, 2014, but it has been improved since then, see http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/integration/shibboleth.html

SAML and Shibboleth is awfully documented itself, so I'm not surprised at all.

Should probably go with "if" instead of "when" ;)

Actual question, do you have much Australian based business and do you see yourselves needing account managers there (here) in the near future?

I meant if indeed :)

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

Thanks! I'll be sure to do so.

MySQL reminded me of something that also should be in our stewardship promises so I added it https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/c3e543a4...

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