Hello everyone, amazing news today, Gitter has been acquired by GitLab. Wow!

Before getting into the details, we’d like to thank the 800,000+ people who make up the Gitter community for your enthusiasm and support for everything we’ve done. You’ve inspired our tiny team to keep shipping and making the open source and developer community a better place to connect to one another.

Gitter will continue to operate as a standalone network for easy community conversation. We will continue to support GitHub and Twitter logins and the integrations we have today. Over the coming months, we will be integrating deeper with GitLab to allow the same functionality for login, creating and joining communities from GitLab.com.

Next piece of wow: we will be open sourcing all of the Gitter. That’s right, the web application, the mobile apps, the whole nine yards, free and open. This will not only allow the community to give back and improve Gitter for everyone, but will also allow communities to run their own Gitter instances.

If your mind isn’t completely blown yet... we will also be making all conversations free and unlimited. We know that many communities want to have private conversations amongst the core team and contributors, this was previously limited to 25 people in private rooms - well that’s a thing of the past and you can talk freely wherever and however you like. All existing paid subscriptions will cease to renew as this functionality is now offered for nothing and any subscription charges made in the last three weeks will be refunded.

So, why GitLab?

GitLab was one of the first third-party integrations in Gitter, and we've been tracking their progress with interest and admiration ever since. GitLab has successfully combined their stewardship of a thriving open source community with a solid open core business model.

Additionally, we've long felt that, as the home of open source communities, there would be great benefits to open sourcing our own codebase. GitLab brings a huge amount of experience in maintaining and fostering open source communities, so when the opportunity came along to unite forces with GitLab and open Gitter up, we jumped at it with enthusiasm.

We see this as an exciting new chapter for Gitter and look forward to the journey ahead with all of you. Feel free to pop into gitterHQ/gitter if you have any questions for us.

Thank you again for all the support.

Mike & Andrew

Frequently asked questions

Can I continue to use Gitter with GitHub accounts and projects?

Absolutely. Login with GitHub and Twitter will continue to work, as well as all of the integrations we have today with GitHub issues and other services. We have had a GitLab integration for a long time and will improve this by adding the ability to login with your GitLab.com account.

When do you plan to open-source Gitter?

We have a little bit of work to do to remove some internal configuration and operating parameters from the Gitter source code. We expect to have this completed and to move the code over to GitLab.com no later than June 2017.

Will I be able to run my own Gitter instance?

Gitter will not be shipped as part of GitLab, but once the code is available as open source (MIT License), you will be able to run Gitter on your own infrastructure.

What about Mattermost, how is this different?

Gitter was built to be used in the open. We’ve always seen Gitter as a network, or a place where people can come to connect to one another. Team collaboration, whilst possible, has never been a core aspect of the Gitter experience.

Mattermost is a powerful, integrated messaging product for team collaboration - we will continue to ship and recommend using Mattermost for internal team communication.

How is this different to Slack?

Many communities have leveraged the Slack API to force it to work for communities. Slack is certainly a great product but has limitations for large communities and public usage. All of Gitter’s public conversation history is completely unlimited, open, archived and indexed by popular search engines, contributing the public knowledge base of the internet.

Will there be a GitLab community on Gitter?

There’s been a community-supported room on Gitter for quite a while, feel free to pop in and say hi. This room isn’t an official support channel and we hope to grow this community over the coming months.

How can I find out more about GitLab?