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Comment by ccostes | Hacker News Reader

> At the time, I was very disappointed to learn that BitBucket.org already offered the same. GitLab took off despite that and GitLab.com recently surpassed 10 million projects.

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.

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He’s talking about when they were first getting started. Their differentiator was going to be free private repositories, and he was disappointed to find out that someone else did it first.

Exactly

It's crazy that they began building GitLab without knowing of Bitbucket. Talk about doing some product research before building...

My memory is pretty hazy, but I believe GitLab began as a simple Git hosting program for people to be able to run on their own servers, and it started without serious intent to build a money-making product. BitBucket Server didn't exist yet (and even today, it's just Atlassian Stash renamed, IIRC.)

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.

I can't imagine it will be long before Azure DevOps is integrated in some way to GitHub. They don't even have to introduce it as such...just a thinly veiled mask for job running. Or even Azure Functions doing the work. MS has the advantages with having Azure behind the scenes so it will be interesting to see what they "give" it.

Bitbucket was originally focused on Mercurial. At the time I think Google Code or whatever they called their Mercurial/SVN hosting was an option too. There was also Gitorious, etc. At that time even Bazaar was still being used by some prominent projects.

Bitbucket has supported Git for a long time now.

This comment and its parent was referring to a long time ago. It's amazing to think how much the landscape changed since these services emerged.

I learned this at the time, years ago. And I was disappointed because I thought offering free private repos would be a unique differentiator in the market.

The whole post is weird. Not sure what point he's trying to make apart from spreading some FUD about Github/Microsoft/Azure.

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