Cloud computing-based code collaboration tool vendor GitLab has announced plans to buy communications platform Gitter.
“Community is core to GitLab’s principles. Our mission is to ensure that everyone can contribute, and over a thousand developers have contributed to GitLab CE. This acquisition is part of the our [sic] strategic plan to become the most popular SaaS solution for public repositories,” blogged Sid Sijbrandij, co-founder and CEO of GitLab “While we are still years away from reaching this goal, we recognize great project chat is an essential element of most open-source projects. Gitter is the leading solution and we expect it to grow even larger in the coming years. When the opportunity came to combine forces, we decided to do it.”
The companies say they plan to integrate Gitter more tightly with GitLab but that Gitter will continue to be available as a separate service. In addition, Gitter will be releasing its platform under an open source license.
