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There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation G

There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.

dominotw 11y ago
Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best. Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.
- oxide 11y ago
  >Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- s986s 11y ago
  Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that? I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication. as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?
  - brbsix 11y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless. However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory/ http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...
    - mbrock 11y ago
      Thiel's monopoly idea might encourage someone building a new repository hosting thing to focus on a particular underserved segment and get everyone in that market. "The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that’s typically evidence that you somehow haven’t defined the categories correctly. It normally means that there is going to be too much competition in one way or another."
  - dominotw 11y ago
    competition should happen naturally( i.e somone offering something clearly superior) not because I think there should be competition on principle.
    - s986s 11y ago
      You define nature? I believe nature is defined by action which is intepreted after the fact or predicted before. Naturally we can also see a community such as hacker news has an effect on the wider population but likely not as strong of one that it, as a group, wants. But hacker news isnt one group but rather many voices that may or may not have similar objectives That is nature Edit: you do because you are apart of it. But your beliefs can influence but do not define nature
    - vertex-four 11y ago
      Surely you're arguing for there to be a monopoly at any given time there - if company X does Y first, you'll always use company X's stuff (even after other companies implement Y) until another company does Z first, in which case you'll always use their stuff. Or, more specifically - there should only be one company in the world manufacturing nuts and bolts, because you can't really create a superior nut. The first company to invent them should've won out.
- typeformer 11y ago
  The killer feature is open source which allows an excellent channel for the community to get what they want one way or another. Gitlab CI is pretty awesome too, we'll see what other surprises come out in the next release.
- middleclick 11y ago
  I don't like that a company like GitHub has access to all my code and things which may include personal information (I sometimes type things in LaTeX and put it under version control). Running GitLab on my server brings my code under my control. Sounds fair? It's the same reason why some people refuse to use Google services like calendar or photos even though they offer convenience.
  - Gratsby 11y ago
    Agreed. I think github enterprise is worth it for companies, just like I think a Jira instance is a no-brainer. For personal/private, I'm perfectly OK with whatever open source solutions are available. I think it would be a good thing if GitLab or another project could compete with GitHub, but I think we're another year/product from really getting there.
  - Qwertious 11y ago
    Service as a Software Substitute?
- ajross 11y ago
  > Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader ... GitHub was "SourceForge, but with git". I mean, I love the product too but let's not oversell things. Free source code hosting and development tools with an enterprise upsell were an established market for a decade before GitHub showed up. They did it better, but I think "trailblazing" is a bit much.
  - Coding_Cat 11y ago
    And social networking features, which have proven to be its gold egg imho. Like the article mentions, Github has for many become a defacto showcase for your body of work.
- TTPrograms 11y ago
  "Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim." The idea of first mover advantage is not that we all get together to recognize the first mover and give it our business because we are so impressed by it's first moving ;)
- tomjen3 11y ago
  Everybody will have different reasons. Free private repositories is a damn pretty compelling reason for me and I suspect many others. It isn't even the free part that matters, it is that you can create a new project or add a friend without having to mentally think about how many projects/collaborators you have left.
m_mueller 11y ago
I've been comparing Github and Gitlab over the last few weeks. Gitlab had a few more features in the web interface, which is why we chose it for a current project. Github has added these features last week, mostly thanks to pressure, which is good. Here's where Gitlab is lacking though: It's quite buggy, its API is nowhere near as good as Github's and there is no way to secure webhooks, which IMO is quite a big deal. If I'd decide today for another project I'd just pay Github 7$ a month and be done with it. In fact if we keep having issues that's exactly what we'll do - migrating in a git world is quite easy for the points mentioned in the article. I've been quite impressed how Github has acted over the last weeks - when there's actually an outcry they're quite nimble and can react quickly. They've noticed the competition catching up and shot themselves ahead of the curve again.
- Gratsby 11y ago
  We used Github enterprise at my previous job, GitLab at my current one. The only driver - GitLab is free. GitLab is painful if you have a lot of experience with Github. Feature comparison is pretty similar, but then again a feature comparison with any SVN web interface is pretty similar too. I can't pinpoint it, but I'm much more likely to browse, review, and offer pull requests in a github instance. It's intuitive and I'm used to it.
  - m_mueller 11y ago
    I can't say that I'm bothered with Gitlab's interface, even though I've had much more experience with Github. It uses more colors which sometimes has the effect of making actionable clicks stand out better. Commenting on committed code is one such example, for some reason that UI feels more clear to me. Also, on github I sometimes find myself looking for the commit list, which I always find immediately on Gitlab. IMO if you're used to both UIs it's either a wash or slightly in favour of Gitlab - my issues are purely in the backend.
    - rms_returns 11y ago
      How trivial it is to send/accept pull-requests with Gitlab? This is one Github feature which I'm highly dependent on. Unlike Mr. Torvalds, we all aren't experts in sending and managing signed pull-requests by emails. Maybe, I'll learn that one day, but Github's features have made me quite lethargic!
metasean 11y ago
Projects can also be mirrored on Github[1], so even if the main repo is somewhere else (e.g. GitLab or Bitbucket) contributors can still be credited via Github[2] and the project can still get the publicity on Github. [1]: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/ https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/ [2]: e.g. https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-24 https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-2...
- johannes1234321 11y ago
  But you can't disable pull requests and other features (at least when I last checked) which means you still have to actively manage those. This probably means handing access to the GitHub repo to your collaborators so they can click "close" if hey don't want to merge. Next to "close" there's this shiny green "merge" button. Clicking that not only merges the untested change but also adds a change to the copy which isn't in the master ... really bad. In the PHP community we "fixed" that by being very restrictive with access to the GitHub repo and provide an extra tool (https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src) where any contributor can comment/close PRs via a special GitHub account and GitHub API
hinkley 11y ago
There was a conversation about got lab last week, which prompted me to go check out Gitlab. After a good five minutes looking around their site I could not discern that it was possible to host repositories on their servers. Their entire sales pitch is about hosting your own. They need to fix that if they want any attention. If they made their pages community oriented, and allowed for people to link their github accounts to their Gitlab accounts, then they would have a shot at stealing the hearts and minds. If they could support forking from github that would be even better, but I bet GitHub would try to block them.
- grrowl 11y ago
  They do mention that hosted GitLab is quite slow, so they strongly encourage you to host your own.
  - scaryclam 11y ago
    Self hosted gitlab is also slow unfortunately. I introduced gitlab to my company as a replacement for gitosis. It's been ok but we're looking to move to gogs.io which is a lot less clunky and slow. If gitlab really want traction, they need to fix their software to be on par with the quality of other open source offerings.
    - chappi42 11y ago
      On what system (resources) are you running gitlab? In my experience it is not slow. I also run a gogs instance; great for the modest resource requirements but by far no match in features and look. Both make sense imho and do not overlap much.
      - mayhew 11y ago
        I don't use GitLab but after browsing the source code on their official site[1] I couldn't help but notice how slow it is. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master
golergka 11y ago
Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos too, but it sucks. This not a strong argument for Gitlab. (I do love it, but for other stuff.)
akerro 11y ago
https://www.b.agilob.net/choose-gitlab-for-your-next-project/ https://www.b.agilob.net/choose-gitlab-for-your-next-project...
dwc 11y ago
> You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore Gitlab often comes up in these discussions. Ok, it comes up every time. Several times in the past I've went and checked it out and it seems interesting except...I couldn't find any actual projects from the main gitlab.com page, aside from the gitlab CE repo itself. So thanks for posting that link! I have to wonder why it's not more prominent. And where's the search to find repos? I regularly find useful repos on github by searching for them. Discoverability is important to me.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vram22 11y ago
  >Discoverability is important to me. Quite a good point. I think, as techies, many of us focus more on the work itself, and not so much on explaining it or making it more discoverable, understood, and on showing its benefits (at least from the point of view of end-users). (As they say about product marketing - explain the benefits, not the features - though I guess that is not to be taken literally, of course the features should be explained too.). I know I need to do more work in this area myself, and am working on it.
  - sytse 11y ago
    We also have a long way to go here and if someone wants to help please apply for the Product Marketing Manager role at https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
- sytse 11y ago
  The explore link was visible from our sign in page but I agree we can do better. I made it visible in the top menu of our static website with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eaba29f48030c46b0208e25d3b9bf825fcb66ad9 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eaba29f4... I'm not sure if we will keep it, that will also depend on how many people click on it. On https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore there is a search field, for an example search please see https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-droid https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-...

dominotw 11y ago

Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best. Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.

oxide 11y ago
>Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
s986s 11y ago
Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that? I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication. as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?
- brbsix 11y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless. However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-business-strategy-and-monopoly-theory/ http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...
  - mbrock 11y ago
    Thiel's monopoly idea might encourage someone building a new repository hosting thing to focus on a particular underserved segment and get everyone in that market. "The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that’s typically evidence that you somehow haven’t defined the categories correctly. It normally means that there is going to be too much competition in one way or another."
- dominotw 11y ago
  competition should happen naturally( i.e somone offering something clearly superior) not because I think there should be competition on principle.
  - s986s 11y ago
    You define nature? I believe nature is defined by action which is intepreted after the fact or predicted before. Naturally we can also see a community such as hacker news has an effect on the wider population but likely not as strong of one that it, as a group, wants. But hacker news isnt one group but rather many voices that may or may not have similar objectives That is nature Edit: you do because you are apart of it. But your beliefs can influence but do not define nature
  - vertex-four 11y ago
    Surely you're arguing for there to be a monopoly at any given time there - if company X does Y first, you'll always use company X's stuff (even after other companies implement Y) until another company does Z first, in which case you'll always use their stuff. Or, more specifically - there should only be one company in the world manufacturing nuts and bolts, because you can't really create a superior nut. The first company to invent them should've won out.
typeformer 11y ago
The killer feature is open source which allows an excellent channel for the community to get what they want one way or another. Gitlab CI is pretty awesome too, we'll see what other surprises come out in the next release.
middleclick 11y ago
I don't like that a company like GitHub has access to all my code and things which may include personal information (I sometimes type things in LaTeX and put it under version control). Running GitLab on my server brings my code under my control. Sounds fair? It's the same reason why some people refuse to use Google services like calendar or photos even though they offer convenience.
- Gratsby 11y ago
  Agreed. I think github enterprise is worth it for companies, just like I think a Jira instance is a no-brainer. For personal/private, I'm perfectly OK with whatever open source solutions are available. I think it would be a good thing if GitLab or another project could compete with GitHub, but I think we're another year/product from really getting there.
- Qwertious 11y ago
  Service as a Software Substitute?
ajross 11y ago
> Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader ... GitHub was "SourceForge, but with git". I mean, I love the product too but let's not oversell things. Free source code hosting and development tools with an enterprise upsell were an established market for a decade before GitHub showed up. They did it better, but I think "trailblazing" is a bit much.
- Coding_Cat 11y ago
  And social networking features, which have proven to be its gold egg imho. Like the article mentions, Github has for many become a defacto showcase for your body of work.
TTPrograms 11y ago
"Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim." The idea of first mover advantage is not that we all get together to recognize the first mover and give it our business because we are so impressed by it's first moving ;)
tomjen3 11y ago
Everybody will have different reasons. Free private repositories is a damn pretty compelling reason for me and I suspect many others. It isn't even the free part that matters, it is that you can create a new project or add a friend without having to mentally think about how many projects/collaborators you have left.

m_mueller 11y ago

I've been comparing Github and Gitlab over the last few weeks. Gitlab had a few more features in the web interface, which is why we chose it for a current project. Github has added these features last week, mostly thanks to pressure, which is good. Here's where Gitlab is lacking though: It's quite buggy, its API is nowhere near as good as Github's and there is no way to secure webhooks, which IMO is quite a big deal. If I'd decide today for another project I'd just pay Github 7$ a month and be done with it. In fact if we keep having issues that's exactly what we'll do - migrating in a git world is quite easy for the points mentioned in the article. I've been quite impressed how Github has acted over the last weeks - when there's actually an outcry they're quite nimble and can react quickly. They've noticed the competition catching up and shot themselves ahead of the curve again.

Gratsby 11y ago
We used Github enterprise at my previous job, GitLab at my current one. The only driver - GitLab is free. GitLab is painful if you have a lot of experience with Github. Feature comparison is pretty similar, but then again a feature comparison with any SVN web interface is pretty similar too. I can't pinpoint it, but I'm much more likely to browse, review, and offer pull requests in a github instance. It's intuitive and I'm used to it.
- m_mueller 11y ago
  I can't say that I'm bothered with Gitlab's interface, even though I've had much more experience with Github. It uses more colors which sometimes has the effect of making actionable clicks stand out better. Commenting on committed code is one such example, for some reason that UI feels more clear to me. Also, on github I sometimes find myself looking for the commit list, which I always find immediately on Gitlab. IMO if you're used to both UIs it's either a wash or slightly in favour of Gitlab - my issues are purely in the backend.
  - rms_returns 11y ago
    How trivial it is to send/accept pull-requests with Gitlab? This is one Github feature which I'm highly dependent on. Unlike Mr. Torvalds, we all aren't experts in sending and managing signed pull-requests by emails. Maybe, I'll learn that one day, but Github's features have made me quite lethargic!

metasean 11y ago

Projects can also be mirrored on Github[1], so even if the main repo is somewhere else (e.g. GitLab or Bitbucket) contributors can still be credited via Github[2] and the project can still get the publicity on Github. [1]: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/ https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/ [2]: e.g. https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-24 https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-2...

johannes1234321 11y ago
But you can't disable pull requests and other features (at least when I last checked) which means you still have to actively manage those. This probably means handing access to the GitHub repo to your collaborators so they can click "close" if hey don't want to merge. Next to "close" there's this shiny green "merge" button. Clicking that not only merges the untested change but also adds a change to the copy which isn't in the master ... really bad. In the PHP community we "fixed" that by being very restrictive with access to the GitHub repo and provide an extra tool (https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src) where any contributor can comment/close PRs via a special GitHub account and GitHub API

hinkley 11y ago

There was a conversation about got lab last week, which prompted me to go check out Gitlab. After a good five minutes looking around their site I could not discern that it was possible to host repositories on their servers. Their entire sales pitch is about hosting your own. They need to fix that if they want any attention. If they made their pages community oriented, and allowed for people to link their github accounts to their Gitlab accounts, then they would have a shot at stealing the hearts and minds. If they could support forking from github that would be even better, but I bet GitHub would try to block them.

grrowl 11y ago
They do mention that hosted GitLab is quite slow, so they strongly encourage you to host your own.
- scaryclam 11y ago
  Self hosted gitlab is also slow unfortunately. I introduced gitlab to my company as a replacement for gitosis. It's been ok but we're looking to move to gogs.io which is a lot less clunky and slow. If gitlab really want traction, they need to fix their software to be on par with the quality of other open source offerings.
  - chappi42 11y ago
    On what system (resources) are you running gitlab? In my experience it is not slow. I also run a gogs instance; great for the modest resource requirements but by far no match in features and look. Both make sense imho and do not overlap much.
    - mayhew 11y ago
      I don't use GitLab but after browsing the source code on their official site[1] I couldn't help but notice how slow it is. [1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master

golergka 11y ago

Bitbucket offers unlimited private repos too, but it sucks. This not a strong argument for Gitlab. (I do love it, but for other stuff.)

akerro 11y ago

https://www.b.agilob.net/choose-gitlab-for-your-next-project/ https://www.b.agilob.net/choose-gitlab-for-your-next-project...

dwc 11y ago

> You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore Gitlab often comes up in these discussions. Ok, it comes up every time. Several times in the past I've went and checked it out and it seems interesting except...I couldn't find any actual projects from the main gitlab.com page, aside from the gitlab CE repo itself. So thanks for posting that link! I have to wonder why it's not more prominent. And where's the search to find repos? I regularly find useful repos on github by searching for them. Discoverability is important to me.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
vram22 11y ago
>Discoverability is important to me. Quite a good point. I think, as techies, many of us focus more on the work itself, and not so much on explaining it or making it more discoverable, understood, and on showing its benefits (at least from the point of view of end-users). (As they say about product marketing - explain the benefits, not the features - though I guess that is not to be taken literally, of course the features should be explained too.). I know I need to do more work in this area myself, and am working on it.
- sytse 11y ago
  We also have a long way to go here and if someone wants to help please apply for the Product Marketing Manager role at https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
sytse 11y ago
The explore link was visible from our sign in page but I agree we can do better. I made it visible in the top menu of our static website with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eaba29f48030c46b0208e25d3b9bf825fcb66ad9 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eaba29f4... I'm not sure if we will keep it, that will also depend on how many people click on it. On https://gitlab.com/explore https://gitlab.com/explore there is a search field, for an example search please see https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-droid https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-...