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Comment by cabraca | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is gitlab becoming more and more bloatware? Is it realy a good idea to bundle everything in one application? Why do i need an integrated artifact management with solutions like sonatype nexus? Is it worth it to add an "awesome environment for ops" on top of kubernetes? why add this complexity?

Dont get me wrong, i like gitlab and use it since the beginning. I just have a problem with this "munch it all together" style of products.

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Gitlab in a way suffers from being open source. Their open source product is so good and includes so many features (even a full featured CI/CD pipeline!), that they need something big to justify their paid version. So I don't blame them. You can disable a lot of stuff that eats away your memory.

Corollary: do you hate Gitlab becoming bloatware and integrated suites? Then pay them! Even if you only use their open source offering, pay them. And not just "pity money" like 100 USD per year, but really pay them as if they're a serious commercial software vendor.

Yeah I know people won't do that. But think about this for a second. It does not apply only to Gitlab but to lots of independent open source software vendors too.

How is that going to solve anything? The more you pay them the more bloated version you're going to get. In fact, if you want to travel lite the community edition is actually your best choice there.

The item it would solve is that if you "pay" then you can more directly influence their road-map. As a customer they want you to be happy and to remain one, that gives you the ability to influence direction. Individually, it may not be a lot, but in aggregate customers have power.

The more you pay them the less they have a reason to make things bloated for the sake of making it sellable to enterpises.

Big corporations also really love bloatware because you can tick off so many feature requirements. The resulting vendor locking compared to a solution comprised of multiple small tools is usually not considered.

Is it that it's not considered, or that getting a whole suite of "work nicely together out of the box" tools from a single vendor is looked on as a better option in most cases?

Especially when things go wrong, having one contact point can be quite valuable, instead of having to go through the cat-herding that is getting someone to agree it's their component that's the problem.

> You can disable a lot of stuff that eats away your memory.

Can you give some examples, and/or a link? I like using Gitlab as an easily portable, one-docker-container-and-you're-running hosting service, so it would be nice to make it more lighteweight.

In the gitlab config file you can disable Mattermost and Prometheus which both use quite a lot of memory.

It's their USP; there are already less full-featured open source solutions like Gogs and Gitea. Once you start adding features like pipelines, it's hard to draw a line between what goes and what doesn't. I guess this vision is where GitLab draws it.

Maybe more like all-in-one platform instead of bloatware. AWS as a stretch for an idea? Obviously they'll need to have high execution to be able to maintain such a diverse set of features. I rather like it right now for an end-to-end solution.

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