‘Fork and Commoditize’ — GitLab CEO on the Threat of the Hyper-Clouds

GitLab exemplifies, in many ways, what is possible in the open source world. Created from scratch with the goal of solving a problem — in this case, how to offer developers a collaborative software platform; GitLab exemplifies the mind and spirit of the open source community. But in the fast-changing world of software development and as tech giants Google, Amazon and Microsoft seek to redefine how software is made and distributed with unparalleled capital resources, open source enterprises face many challenges and threats — some of which border on the existential for many projects. During this first podcast episode in the relaunched The New Stack @ Scale series, hosted by Alex Williams, founder and editor-in-chief of The New Stack and recorded during the Open Source Leadership Summit; Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO, of GitLab, discussed the state of development open source development today. He also discussed emerging threats, such as those posed by the hypercloud model and what many say is the menace of what Sijbrandij describes as Amazon AWS’s “fork and commoditize” strategy.