[parasubvert]

This is Gitlab taking stuff they were doing already internally and making it available to a broader audience.

Once you take VC funding, you gotta go where the money is. Everyone wants/expects "fast, stable, like Github" for free unless you have special needs. So, you do analytics on what people are doing with your free site, you offer enterprisey features, you get into the "platform" business etc.

I think Gitlab distracts itself, spreads itself thin, and isn't great at partnering, its ambition to do-it-all knows no bounds, which is both commendable and a smh moment. It's not likely sustainable or scalable. They're definitely trying to "go big or go home" as a company, which is not how most originally felt about Gitlab (a fast, stable OSS alternative to Github).

At the same time, I can't blame them. I think it comes down to: Don't hate the player, hate the game.

[sytse]

We are building a fast, stable, GitHub alternative.

We have hired 3 times as many people in our security team for GitLab.com (not our product team for security) as are working on Meltano.

We have hired 3 times as many people in our SRE teams as are working on Meltano.

And we still have a lot of vacancies for both https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

[parasubvert]

I meant no offense. But you’re also dabbling in building your own k8s distro / platform, you have your own CI/CD , Jira storyboard , and data science stuff, etc.

My point is that you’re aiming a lot broader than Github ever did - you are competing more as a suite than as a focused product.

And I’ve seen personally this impact the support side with customers, partnership side, etc. I help maintain a medium-large Gitlab for one of your bigger customers. Anyway this isn’t the place for me to get specific, I am just saying that you are taking a risky path in terms of sustainability IMO as a rando on the internet.