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Comment by sytse

8 years ago

Thanks for mentioning GitLab as the next big one. We're seeing people #movingtogitlab

GitLab is also venture funded. What's the end game there? Wouldn't GitLab's investors, including YC, be ecstatic to see the company achieve a similar outcome? Wouldn't they consider basically any other outcome to be a failure?

The bigger question is why GitHub didn't IPO. They have name recognition and prominence such that it wouldn't really be a surprise to hear that they were doing so. I don't have any internal details, so maybe the numbers just didn't line up, but that would've been the investor-approved exit that allowed it to maintain some neutrality.

That leads to the next question: if GitHub didn't/couldn't IPO with all of its name recognition, why should anyone expect that GitLab will?

While Atlassian's open-source pedigree is much weaker, they own BitBucket, and they're a bootstrapped startup that focuses on developer tools. They IPO'd a few years ago. They're probably the best bet for developers interested in a "neutral" hosting platform.

  • Should be the big winner as the big guys move off of GitHub. Hopefully they will all go to a common site.

    Finally had a single site and MS destroys it.