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I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they we

I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this letter, which changed my perspective quite a lot. I didn't know that had features like voting on issues, and issue templates. So now it even feels like they're doing Git hosting the right way, making the core software open source, and charging for enterprise features. On the other hand, I would have probably never paid for GitHub if they followed this model. So I don't think GitHub would have been as successful.

Vespasian 11y ago
We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that. I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)
- dev360 11y ago
  A good friend of mine likes to run https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ .. I havent used it heavily but Ive been impressed so far.
  - bovermyer 11y ago
    I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link. It seems just about everything is being re-written in Go these days...
    - xena 11y ago
      Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails.
      - quesera 11y ago
        > Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails. You could have said that without cheapening the level of discourse.
      - dham 11y ago
        Does that even matter in the world of Docker?
        bovermyer 11y ago
        Yes, because not everyone uses Docker yet. Some may never adopt it. So long as that remains a viable path, then the matter of deployment systems and complexity is relevant.
      - Ellahn 11y ago
        Unless you are smart enough to be a Rubyist. If you're not you just seem like someone who came to the NodeJS Party late and didn't understand Go is C for gigantic codebases using parallelism. :D
  - talideon 11y ago
    It's a bit of a pity that they don't self host, even if they also have a Github repo.
  - kzrdude 11y ago
    I wonder why they advertise the "platform"/implementation language so clearly (in this case Go). It shouldn't matter for the users? I get sceptical, as if the only reason they exist is to provide the same service but in a new implementation.
    - rcarmo 11y ago
      Performance. That thing is _fast_ when compared to a Ruby-based stack.
      - Ellahn 11y ago
        Does this really affect end users? In the end, this decision should mostly mean less servers, no...?
        rcarmo 11y ago
        Sysadmins are people too :)
  - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
    I've been using Gogs for personal use for a while. I love its speed and its simplicity. That said, it's probably not a good fit for most businesses at this point. It's relatively new, and mostly maintained by a single developer, who spent the last summer on vacation. He's very active when he's around, and almost always working on improving Gogs, but there's a lot of people with features requests (the issue that's always getting comments today is for opening pull requests across branches within a single repository -- i.e. not forking.)
- rplnt 11y ago
  There's also Stash (now renamed to BitBucket Server (edit: fixed name, as pointed out in the reply)). It does not include some of the features (such as issue tracking), and I think rightly so. I haven't used GitLab for maybe 2 years now, so I can't compare the two.
  - lmm 11y ago
    It's named bitbucket server or something like that - don't confuse it with bitbucket proper.
  - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
    To be clear, it doesn't support issue tracking because it is an Atlassian project. Issue tracking is done through Jira, another product they offer.
    - nate148 11y ago
      Umm no, you are incorrect. Bitbucket does have its own issue tracker like GitHub.. (but it is not turned on by default) and what I am referring to is NOT JIRA Software. https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/enable-an-issue-tracker-223216498.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/enable-an-issue-t...
      - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
        That looks to be for Bitbucket Cloud. We were discussing Bitbucket Server, the hosted solution.
- niutech 11y ago
  You should also consider Apache Allura (https://allura.apache.org/ https://allura.apache.org/), Fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org/ http://www.fossil-scm.org/), Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/) and GitBucket (https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/ https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/).
vincentkriek 11y ago
I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspect of GitLab and I think they should keep focussing on that however their instance of GitLab [1] is notoriously slow and unreliable. A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub [1] http://gitlab.com http://gitlab.com
- DouweM 11y ago
  > A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub Believe me, we would too and we are sorry about the current state of GitLab.com. We are working on improving performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues
  - dexterdog 11y ago
    It may be more stable than GitLab, but I have never thought of GitHub as "rock stable."
- sqldba 11y ago
  As a hobbyist I only commit one small thing a week or so without any issues. I'm curious what stability issues they have for later projects, if you'd care to elucidate?
- georgefrick 11y ago
  Can you comment more on why a hobbyist should not need their own repo? If I'm doing SaaS for everything, my monthly costs start to go up. I've found it is far cheaper, and far (way!) more educational to take an extra box out of the basement and install Ubuntu/GitLab/Node/Java/Apache/Etc. I have to pay for internet either way, and the electricity cost is nowhere near the cost of having multiple Saas?
bad_user 11y ago
We've been using GitLab CE internally in our organization for more than a year. We needed an on-premises solution because of the company's policy. The experience has been great thus far. On EE, there's nothing that we miss from the EE version, although we might end up going with EE after the team will grow. We also have dedicated dev-ops, otherwise having support for it would sounds good. And the pricing for EE if you go that route is much better than for GitHub Enterprise. Personally I have mixed feelings about the "open core" model, as many times it's just a marketing stunt. But for now that's not the case with GitLab.
- sytse 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm happy to hear that in your case the feature tradeoff we made between CE and EE worked out.
lexicality 11y ago
> I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Seems like they were just following in the footsteps of one of Open Source's great prophets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Events_leading_to_GNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Events_leadin...
- cyphar 11y ago
  Richard Stallman is the "prophet" of free software. The EE license is not a free software license (and probably isn't an open source one either). The given license doesn't give you any of the four essential freedoms.

Vespasian 11y ago

We are dealing with a lot of sensitive data and code which is legally not allowed to physically leave our group and GitLab is in my opinion the best open source choice for that. I feel its community edition is up to par with github in most aspects and it a was a change towards the better from our previous svn based solution (Redmine)

dev360 11y ago
A good friend of mine likes to run https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ .. I havent used it heavily but Ive been impressed so far.
- bovermyer 11y ago
  I was unaware of this. Thanks for the link. It seems just about everything is being re-written in Go these days...
  - xena 11y ago
    Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails.
    - quesera 11y ago
      > Go is easier to deploy than Rubby on Fails. You could have said that without cheapening the level of discourse.
    - dham 11y ago
      Does that even matter in the world of Docker?
      - bovermyer 11y ago
        Yes, because not everyone uses Docker yet. Some may never adopt it. So long as that remains a viable path, then the matter of deployment systems and complexity is relevant.
    - Ellahn 11y ago
      Unless you are smart enough to be a Rubyist. If you're not you just seem like someone who came to the NodeJS Party late and didn't understand Go is C for gigantic codebases using parallelism. :D
- talideon 11y ago
  It's a bit of a pity that they don't self host, even if they also have a Github repo.
- kzrdude 11y ago
  I wonder why they advertise the "platform"/implementation language so clearly (in this case Go). It shouldn't matter for the users? I get sceptical, as if the only reason they exist is to provide the same service but in a new implementation.
  - rcarmo 11y ago
    Performance. That thing is _fast_ when compared to a Ruby-based stack.
    - Ellahn 11y ago
      Does this really affect end users? In the end, this decision should mostly mean less servers, no...?
      - rcarmo 11y ago
        Sysadmins are people too :)
- johnmaguire2013 11y ago
  I've been using Gogs for personal use for a while. I love its speed and its simplicity. That said, it's probably not a good fit for most businesses at this point. It's relatively new, and mostly maintained by a single developer, who spent the last summer on vacation. He's very active when he's around, and almost always working on improving Gogs, but there's a lot of people with features requests (the issue that's always getting comments today is for opening pull requests across branches within a single repository -- i.e. not forking.)
rplnt 11y ago
There's also Stash (now renamed to BitBucket Server (edit: fixed name, as pointed out in the reply)). It does not include some of the features (such as issue tracking), and I think rightly so. I haven't used GitLab for maybe 2 years now, so I can't compare the two.
- lmm 11y ago
  It's named bitbucket server or something like that - don't confuse it with bitbucket proper.
- johnmaguire2013 11y ago
  To be clear, it doesn't support issue tracking because it is an Atlassian project. Issue tracking is done through Jira, another product they offer.
  - nate148 11y ago
    Umm no, you are incorrect. Bitbucket does have its own issue tracker like GitHub.. (but it is not turned on by default) and what I am referring to is NOT JIRA Software. https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/enable-an-issue-tracker-223216498.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucket/enable-an-issue-t...
    - johnmaguire2013 11y ago
      That looks to be for Bitbucket Cloud. We were discussing Bitbucket Server, the hosted solution.
niutech 11y ago
You should also consider Apache Allura (https://allura.apache.org/ https://allura.apache.org/), Fossil (http://www.fossil-scm.org/ http://www.fossil-scm.org/), Phabricator (http://phabricator.org/ http://phabricator.org/) and GitBucket (https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/ https://gitbucket.github.io/gitbucket-news/).

vincentkriek 11y ago

I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspect of GitLab and I think they should keep focussing on that however their instance of GitLab [1] is notoriously slow and unreliable. A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub [1] http://gitlab.com http://gitlab.com

DouweM 11y ago
> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub Believe me, we would too and we are sorry about the current state of GitLab.com. We are working on improving performance in Q1 2016: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues
- dexterdog 11y ago
  It may be more stable than GitLab, but I have never thought of GitHub as "rock stable."
sqldba 11y ago
As a hobbyist I only commit one small thing a week or so without any issues. I'm curious what stability issues they have for later projects, if you'd care to elucidate?
georgefrick 11y ago
Can you comment more on why a hobbyist should not need their own repo? If I'm doing SaaS for everything, my monthly costs start to go up. I've found it is far cheaper, and far (way!) more educational to take an extra box out of the basement and install Ubuntu/GitLab/Node/Java/Apache/Etc. I have to pay for internet either way, and the electricity cost is nowhere near the cost of having multiple Saas?

bad_user 11y ago

We've been using GitLab CE internally in our organization for more than a year. We needed an on-premises solution because of the company's policy. The experience has been great thus far. On EE, there's nothing that we miss from the EE version, although we might end up going with EE after the team will grow. We also have dedicated dev-ops, otherwise having support for it would sounds good. And the pricing for EE if you go that route is much better than for GitHub Enterprise. Personally I have mixed feelings about the "open core" model, as many times it's just a marketing stunt. But for now that's not the case with GitLab.

sytse 11y ago
Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm happy to hear that in your case the feature tradeoff we made between CE and EE worked out.

lexicality 11y ago

> I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Seems like they were just following in the footsteps of one of Open Source's great prophets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Events_leading_to_GNU https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Events_leadin...

cyphar 11y ago
Richard Stallman is the "prophet" of free software. The EE license is not a free software license (and probably isn't an open source one either). The given license doesn't give you any of the four essential freedoms.