GitLab’s CEO reflects on GitHub’s move to offer free private repos
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
Briefly our (my team's) goal is to respond to every question about GitLab asked online and to stay transparent [2] about evrerything. This helps us to create better documentation and processes as well as it's easier to provide feedback into GitLab.
Regarding the user feedback and preferences on HN, everyone's comment is welcome and we really appreciate the words from the competitor's side.
It's really interesting that many people at GitLab joins the HN threads and you probably noticed our CEO's activity as well as many other GitLabbers.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/job-families/marketing/community-ad... [2] https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/values/#transparency
Nothing wrong with that of course though, just interesting to observe that connection.
Is it just me, or does this sentence not make sense? I don't know why this is disappointing to him, or why he would just be learning this now.
When they went to launch GitLab.com, they probably did more product research at that point, and that's probably where the disappointment came in.
I think GitLab's approach is pretty cool, and software toward developers really ought to be developed in this manner: start with the problem, then work on the product. No point in trying to build a product for a problem you can't solve. GitLab today is certainly a better product for being heavily oriented around solving developer's problems; for example, having GitLab CI built-in and even usable for free even on private repositories on GitLab.com is incredible, and it's one of those things that are going to continue to be enticing as GitHub increases the competition.
And considering they purchased github, I'm starting to wonder if they did it just to get a name that have more acceptance and will be migrating git hub to this same model and infrastructure but with a different face.
> Free for small teams under 5 and priced to scale with Standard ($2/user/mo) or Premium ($5/user/mo) plans.
As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows. They are also apparently going to support their VFS for Git protocol on GitHub, but VFS for Git is open source and supports Windows and Mac (and apparently, will support Linux.) And they claim Git is now the source control for Windows, which is impressive if true. By all accounts, Microsoft has been supporting Git in some form for several years and appears to have only increased their stake.
I still think GitLab is awesome, though. There's a whole ton of things GitLab does that GitHub does not. I will probably continue to use both, myself.
I disagree. Their tactics are alive and well. Have you used Office to export a CSV file in the last few years? They have done everything they can to make it inoperable out of the box. (BOM, not escaping data, etc.)
> As far as I know, Microsoft has been supporting the development of Git for Windows
That's the first and second E's in EEE. Wait for the extinguish portion of their plan.
I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
I do not know what their justification is for those defaults. They could, for all I know, have good reasoning, like legacy support. It's possible, though less likely, that they simply didn't put much thought into it.
I do know that the xlsx format is standardized. I've not used it myself, but I've heard it's not unreasonable (whereas docx is apparently a bit less reasonable.) And I mean, from my experience I've not had trouble opening Excel spreadsheets in LibreOffice or Google Sheets. If they broke in any way, I failed to notice.
In any case it sounds like minor greivances and a pretty darn far cry from 90s Microsoft.
>I'm happy you're willing to double-down on Microsoft software, but I'm not getting anywhere near that time-bomb again.
Well this is incorrect. I use GitHub but I'm not doubling down. I don't use Windows except in VMs, I find it to be downright vexatious and even the new Windows 10 for Workstations is still incredibly annoying (yep, still getting Cortana SPAM by default.) I also find it suspicious when Edge is magically the default browser or my file associations to IrfanView keep getting reset to Windows Photo Viewer due to "corrupt file associations," yet those same file associations work fine if I uninstall Windows Photo Viewer.
Those things are really super annoying. However, even some of the more egregious behaviors hit me as unlikely to be intentional. I am frustrated at an upsettingly similar rate by open source software and it only recently occurred to me that I would almost never attribute this to underhanded tactics.
I still prefer my open source software, but I do think Microsoft is different. Time will tell.
There's an RFC for csv data (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180), there's no way to tell Excel to honour it.
That RFC is from 2005. Excel appeared in 1987.
Excel outputs CSVs in Excel dialect rather than RFC 4180. Unfortunate as it is, it's probably only sane to do that. A lot of stuff has probably relied on it for decades. Python 3, for example, defaults to excel dialect in it's CSV library. Apache Commons CSV supports Excel dialect. I imagine there's all kinds of crap relying on this by now.
The fact that it doesn't have an option to output in RFC 4180 is unideal, but I can certainly see why. For almost their entire userbase, it would be the wrong option. I don't think they really want more code paths to maintain either. Seems logical enough.
Of course it's relatively easy to support XLS/XLSX and it should be relatively easy to automatically detect what dialect of CSV you're taking in. So if your goal is happier customers, then you have options. It is what it is.
I don't think this is a JScript type situation here. The world mostly standardized on Excel style CSV and a different standard was blessed by IETF. But much like HTML5 vs XHTML, sometimes standards should be descriptive rather than prescriptive. RFC 4180 would've been more useful had it followed Excel dialect. Instead I think it leaves Microsoft in a tough place and their decision has been to not change it in line with how they normally treat backwards compatibility.
Far from a staunch fan of Microsoft myself, but I do think it's important to stay rational and have some reasonable skepticism.
I am using the Apache CSV library to parse csv. Content coming from Excel is still ... difficult. And Apache is fine with handling RFC 4180 compliant content.
If the "new" Microsoft is really opening up to Open Source, it'd be nice if they honoured existing standards at least with products which are still under development. All I am asking for is one more entry in the "Save As..." dialogs drop down box. It can't be that hard...
On the contrary, I don't see them as having changed at all. The old tactics are still in play; they've just gotten better at convincing the gullible that they are now on their side.
After the Windows 10 fiasco as well, I'm done with the company.
Or you could made a measured decision on a product by product basis.
As I'm sure you do with all the other big tech companies which have massively betrayed us.
Unless you're telling me you boycott all products by Google, Apple, Facebook and Oracle (for starters).
Yes, that's exactly what I'm telling you.
I was raised on a UK council estate and none of my family had ever been to university before I did (and it was a former polytechnic). I'm far from making the kind of money the rest of you guys on HN do. Despite that, I can still justify the few £'s a month (£18.50 in total) I actually spend on service provided by non-shitty companies.
Try addressing what I said instead of taking this immature attitude. Or just admit that cost has nothing to do with why you stick with and defend abusive companies.
£45k pre-tax is top 15% household income nationally...
My point is that I can't afford to pick and choose companies I work for to avoid big tech. I work in .NET, but I have no idea how I'd find a company that doesn't use Office365 these days.
It's not personal usage that funds these companies, it's enterprise usage. Working with (and hence endorsing and funding) software that abusive companies makes is the problem, not the tiny amounts individuals spend.
The only way I know to avoid that is to be self-employed, or own a company yourself.