There's (almost) no GitLab - by Julien Danjou

As I spent hours screening software engineer candidates those last weeks, I repeatedly answered the same question: where’s Mergify support for GitLab?

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.

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.

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