GitLab Inc. is an
open-core company that operates GitLab, a
DevOps software package that can develop, secure, and operate software.[9] The
open-source software project was created by
Ukrainian developer Dmytro Zaporozhets and Dutch developer Sytse Sijbrandij.[10] In 2018, GitLab Inc. was considered to be the first partly-
Ukrainianunicorn.[11][12]
GitLab has an estimated 30 million registered users, including 1 million active licensed users.[9][13]
Overview
GitLab Inc. was established in 2014 to continue the development of the open-source code-sharing platform launched in 2011 by Dmytro Zaporozhets. The company's co-founder Sytse Sijbrandij initially contributed to the project and decided to build a business around it.[14][15] GitLab
offers its platform using a
freemium model.[14]
Since its founding, GitLab Inc. has promoted
remote work[16] and is known as one of the largest all-remote companies in the world.[17] By 2020, the company employed 1300 people in 65 countries.[16][18]
In January 2017, a database administrator accidentally deleted the production database in the aftermath of a
cyber attack, causing the loss of a substantial amount of issue data and merge request data.[19] The recovery process was
live-streamed on
YouTube.[20][21]
In April 2018, GitLab Inc. announced integration with
Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to simplify the process of spinning up a new cluster to deploy applications.[22]
In May 2018,
GNOME moved to GitLab with over 400 projects and 900 contributors.[23][24]
On August 1, 2018, GitLab Inc. started development of Meltano.[25]
In October 2019, the company introduced a "no-vetting" policy for customers (except when required by law) and banned political discussions in the workplace. These restrictions were subsequently relaxed in response to some particular criticisms.[28][29]
In 2020 at the beginning of the
COVID-19 pandemic, GitLab Inc. released "GitLab's Guide to All-Remote" as well as a course on remote management for the purpose of aiding companies interested in building all-remote work cultures.[30][31]
April 2020 saw the expansion of GitLab Inc. into the Australian and Japanese markets.[32][33] In November that same year, GitLab Inc. was valued at more than $6 billion in a secondary market evaluation.[34]
In 2021, OMERS participated in a secondary shares investment in GitLab Inc.[35]
On June 2, 2021, GitLab Inc. also acquired UnReview, a tool that automates software review cycles.[36]
On March 18, 2021, GitLab Inc. licensed its technology to the Chinese company JiHu.[37]
On June 30, 2021, GitLab Inc.
spun out Meltano, an open source
ELT platform.[38]
On July 23, 2021, GitLab Inc. released its software Package Hunter, a Falco-based tool that detects malicious code,[39] under the open-source MIT Licence.
On August 4, 2022, GitLab announced its plans for changing its Data Retention Policy and for automatically deleting inactive repositories which have not been modified for a year. As a result, in the following days GitLab received much criticism from the open-source community.[40] Shortly after, it was announced that dormant projects would not be deleted, and would instead remain accessible in an archived state, potentially using a slower type of storage.[41][42]
In May 2023, the company launched the "GitLab 16.0" platform as an AI-driven DevSecOps solution. It contained over 55 new features and enhancements.[43]
GitLab Forge was officially adopted in 2023 by the French Ministry for Education to create a "Digital Educational Commons" of educational resources.[51]
Acquisitions
In March 2015, GitLab Inc. acquired competing
Git hosting Service
Gitorious, which had around 822,000 registered users at the time.[52] These users were encouraged to move to GitLab and the Gitorious service was discontinued in June 2015.[52]
On March 15, 2017, GitLab Inc. announced the acquisition of
Gitter.[53] Included in the announcement was the stated intent that Gitter would continue as a standalone project. Additionally, GitLab Inc. announced that the code would become
open-source under an
MIT License no later than June 2017.[54]
In January 2018, GitLab Inc. acquired Gemnasium, a service that provided security scanners with alerts for known security vulnerabilities in open-source libraries of various languages.[55] The service was scheduled for complete shut-down on May 15. Gemnasium features and technology was integrated into GitLab EE and as part of
CI/CD.[56]
On June 11, 2020, GitLab Inc. acquired Peach Tech, a security software firm specializing in protocol
fuzz testing, and Fuzzit,[57] a continuous “fuzz” security testing solution.