People close to GitLab have told Reuters that the DevOps pipeline service is looking for a buyer and that cloud monitoring company Datadog is expressing an interest.
As far as I can tell, the folks at San Francisco-based GitLab haven’t hung a “For Sale” sign in the window, but evidently they have been talking to investment bankers and are looking for a buyer.
GitLab is the company behind the eponymous platform that can develop, secure, and operate software, supplying DevOps teams with a continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline. The software includes distributed version control based on Git, as well as such features as access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, project wikis, and more.
In an exclusive story that was released early yesterday afternoon, Reuters reported that “according to people familiar with the matter,” the company has been working with investment bankers in a process that has garnered interest from Datadog, which operates a software as a service platform for cloud monitoring. Neither GitLab nor Datadog are talking.
Although any potential purchase is currently at least several weeks away, InvestorPlace’s Dana Blankenhorn reported yesterday that GitLab’s stock rose by 15% in overnight trading Tuesday night. Shares are down about 20% for the year, however, mainly over investor concerns over price pressures from GitHub. The company, which has a market capitalization of more than $8 billion, went public in 2022.
Alphabet owns 22% of the company’s voting stock through Google Ventures, but its largest stockholder is its CEO and cofounder Sid Sijbrandij, who controls 45.51% of voting stock. In June, during the company’s quartly earnings call, Sijbrandij revealed that he will be undergoing treatment for osteosarcoma, a type of cancer for which he was also treated last year, but indicated that he would continue working during his treatment.
Due to GitLab’s perceived open source status, the company became something of a big deal in FOSS circles back in 2018 after Microsoft bought rival GitHub. In reality, the platform isn’t pure play open source but is based on an open core model that includes proprietary “source available” software in its Enterprise Edition, but with a Community Edition that is completely open source — licensed under the MIT and other licenses.
Although it appears that most of the platform’s 30 million registered users are running the free Community Edition — no surprise there — the company’s website says that more than 50% of Fortune 100 companies deploy the platform.
Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
