Koding open-sources its cloud IDE, integrates it into GitLab

Koding, a startup with technology for operating a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE) for collaborative programming across devices, is announcing today that it’s open-sourcing its core technology and making it a part of GitLab, the open-source source-code repository service.

With the push of a green button on GitLab repository pages, developers will be able to run any software on GitLab, with all the necessary dependencies already in place. “It almost feels like a part of GitLab,” Koding cofounder and CEO Devrim Yasar told VentureBeat in an interview.

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Pushing that green button should speed up the process of making changes and encourage people to start using open-source GitLab projects more quickly. But it will also become easier for people to start working on and submit changes to projects, because Koding will be integrated into GitLab’s continuous-integration system.

“You don’t have to install anything locally, and that sometimes saves the day,” GitLab cofounder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Your computer doesn’t overheat, your battery life isn’t affected. And you don’t need to enter any special credentials, either,” he said.

Today’s news comes shortly after the cloud IDE concept — which some developers have historically looked down upon, because they prefer to use IDEs or text editors that run on their desktop computers — was validated through Amazon Web Services’ acquisition of startup Cloud9. With Koding, it’s possible for developers to work inside the text editors or IDEs they prefer, by way of the kd tool.

The move to open-source Koding should make developers feel more comfortable building with it, and the technology could become stronger, relative to competitors, as more external developers contribute improvements to it. Now that the core IDE is freely available, Koding will focus on selling licenses for its enterprise edition.

GitLab, for its part, is gaining a nifty new feature that will help it stand out more from GitHub, which had more than 10 million users as of last year and 35 million projects. Another competitor is Atlassian, with its Bitbucket service.

This isn’t the first time GitLab has integrated other technologies into its offering. Mattermost, an open-source team communication app, now ships with GitLab, and a container registry based on Docker’s open-source software is also part of GitLab, Sijbrandij said.

Currently, Koding only lets users run its cloud IDE on top of Amazon Web Services, but soon it will gain support for Microsoft Azure, the Google Cloud Platform, and DigitalOcean, Yasar said.

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Last year, Koding raised $10 million, and GitLab raised $4 million. Both startups have their headquarters in San Francisco.

Koding’s IDE software is available now on GitHub. Koding’s blog and GitLab’s blog have more detail on the new integration.