There's (almost) no GitLab
A word on a French bias.
Do you guys support GitLab? Is there any way this can work with GitLab? Does this support merge requests?
No, we don’t.
As I spent hours screening software engineer candidates those last weeks, I repeatedly answered the same question: where’s Mergify support for GitLab?
To put things into perspective, we mostly hire in the French market, and I think it deserves some context.
Culture Bias
I’ve known software engineers for more than 20 years in the country of the baguette, and something is pretty clear. We have amazing engineers, but they suck at understanding what ROI means. Most people have no conception of the value of time, and for most average French engineers, it’s OK to spend time on anything as long as it avoids spending money (or requesting a budget).
It’s not even a frugality thing; it really is just the inability to compute a basic return on investment and put a price on an hour of work.
In the context of software forges, that means something: French companies, from startups to scaleups, are heavily biased towards deploying GitLab Community Edition because it’s free. They would do this over a cheap hosting bare metal server. You can find such hosting for around $20/month.
At this price, the average French software engineer will not buy a GitHub license. They’d call that a rip-off.
I’ve heard it.
If you don’t factor in the time it takes to spin up and maintain the GitLab instance or the impact of having your server on fire, then, indeed, a price of $20/month is unbeatable.
I remember asking one young French engineer in a startup about their GitLab instance and how they would maintain it and manage its security compliance. The answer was straightforward:
We just run `apt upgrade` every night so we’re sure we’ve every security deployment installed.
YMMV.
The Market Share
In April 2024, the Mergify team spent a few days at Devoxx France, the country's largest developer conference with nearly 5,000 attendees. We talked to dozens of engineers, and roughly 50% of them were using GitLab at work. Some large teams were moving away from GitLab to GitHub, but for a large majority, we were weirdos for not supporting GitLab. Their view of the market share is biased toward the French market, where GitLab might indeed have a large usage, which might not tend to generate large revenue, though. Remember that the Community Edition of GitLab is free.
If we compare GitHub’s $2 billion revenue to GitLab’s $579 million revenue for 2024, this is a 1:4 ratio, which is already pretty huge. Sure, revenue is not usage, but considering that GitHub has Microsoft behind it and GitLab is reportedly looking for a buyer, the future looks way brighter for GitHub. And I’m not even talking about the fact that the vast majority of open-source projects use GitHub.
Innovation
Now that I’ve set the scenery, I feel it’s safe to answer about GitLab support for Mergify. The main reasons why Mergify’s Merge Queue is not looking for GitLab support anytime soon are:
Innovation happens on GitHub nowadays. Ten years ago, GitHub was behind on certain topics (hello CI), but they are now way ahead of the competition. GitHub is the place where most open-source is built and where you need to be if you’re building new products;
Most teams using GitLab CE have no intention to buy any software;
The market share of GitLab is small and probably shrinking.
I’ve nothing against GitLab, and their software might be pretty good. All we know is that they’re outsiders, while a lot of the tech market in Europe seems to think that betting on GitLab is the best go-to-market strategy.
I beg to differ.