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Looking at this thread here, Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community, yet Github (still) remain

Looking at this thread here, Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community, yet Github (still) remains the popular option, despite their more community-hostile traditional board-meeting decision process. Is there a gradual shift in the FOSS community towards Gitlab (which in all honesty would make more sense), or am I just seeing the enthusiast in this thread?

dudul 11y ago
I can't tell if there is a real shift, I would say no. GitHub, in a lot of people, is synonymous to Git. GitLab is superior in a lot of ways, more feature, open source, very open as you pointed out. Their pricing model supports free private repos. Not sure what it would take to really make people reconsider GitHub as the default goto place to host OSS repos.
- x1024 11y ago
  "GitHub failing hard". GitLab is great, but it's kind of a copycat project. Nothing wrong with that, it's just there really isn't a compelling reason to join beyond "less-predatory pricing". And the people who care about that use private repos, not OSS.
  - dudul 11y ago
    For example, a lot of people complain about issues on GitHub. GitLab handles those much better, that could be a compelling reason to move, but somehow it doesn't seem to be enough. Private repo can be useful for early stage of OSS projects. Agreed though that it still feels too much like a clone of GitHub. The UI for example is way to close to the original.
    - stormbrew 11y ago
      Having used both there's more than enough in either that's bad to justify a switch to the other if you really want to. I personally prefer github's warts to gitlab's. In particular, I find that general site navigation on gitlab is quite tedious and it rarely centres useful information first. But that is very much a qualitative and not a quantitative complaint. The main thing I find extra useful on gitlab is the ability to mark a MR as a WIP.
      - sytse 11y ago
        Glad you like our WIP function. Do you maybe have any suggestions how we can make navigation better and/or examples of pages where you are missing information?
        cyphar 11y ago
        The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive (sometimes what I want is in the sidebar but sometimes it's in the main page). For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar? And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use". And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it? This is something I feel GitHub does better -- things are much faster to access and IMO much more intuitive.
        sytse 11y ago
        Thanks, I've asked our UX engineer to look into this.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        askyruler 11y ago
        Thank you for your feedback, we aware about these issues and already working on improvements on our side, stay tuned!
        randx 11y ago
        Thank you for your feedback. > The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body. > For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar? Good example. Agree its still non-intuitive in some places. For you particular example we created an issue to fix - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480. > And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use" Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria. > And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it? You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences. P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
  - dogweather 11y ago
    > predatory pricing I've always thought GitHub's pricing is awesome and very accessible. Can you explain?
    - nazgob 11y ago
      It'ss quite bad for my company. We have to pay per repo and we like to create quite a lot of small libs and microservices. I'd like to have a option of per user payment.
      - dogweather 11y ago
        Ah hah, that's interesting. Yep, the per-repo metric does weigh more heavily on architectures based on smaller more granular projects.
      - tedmiston 11y ago
        Very similar here. My startup is 3 years old with ~10-15 developers, but we make many small repos -- about 150 in that amount of time. Even though it's not tons of code, GitHub's pricing breaks down horribly in this case. I think that that in the long run many startups will move to embrace GitLab in the early days for price if nothing else.
    - x1024 11y ago
      Suppose you are a web agency. Every single project for every single client should be version-controlled, right? But that tends to quickly add up when using GitHub - about a dollar per project per month. So, if my company finishes 30 projects per year, we'd be paying $360/year to GitHub for what is essentially "storing a backup". And if we do this every year, that's $1000/year within 3 years. Not to mention that for "Organizations" the prices are doubled. For some reason. So... $2000/year? Right now the same job is done by a $5/mo linode, with the prospects of upgrading to $10/mo.
  - typeformer 11y ago
    And also remember that you can host public repos for free too on Gitlab.com
- tedmiston 11y ago
  I believe every Techstars batch does a tools survey across batch companies (at least R/GA Techstars in NYC did) then emails everyone the summary with bar charts. The one I have is mostly about analytics, sales, and support tools, and unfortunately repository hosting wasn't a question asked. I also wish they would make this data source public so others could see shifts early -- for example the wave from HipChat to Slack would have been very visible. Perhaps StackShare might be the closest open source of similar data. http://stackshare.io/code-collaboration-version-control http://stackshare.io/code-collaboration-version-control
amelius 11y ago
I'm not sure if anyone can answer that question. Personally, I hope we can eventually move to a federated system, perhaps one based on ipfs.
- hackbinary 11y ago
  Well, ipfs sounds interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System
toyg 11y ago
Github's shortcomings only really came to the fore in the last couple of months, due to a combination of factors. GitLab is working hard to exploit the current window of opportunity to make waves. I'm slightly surprised BitBucket is not doing the same, but their Atlassian masters seem more interested in pushing irrelevant features at the moment (like SSO across products I don't care about). It's too early to talk about a shift away from GH, but increased variety in the ecosystem can only be a good thing, compared to the dangers of a GH monoculture... especially considering git migrations are literally just one push to a new origin.
- s_kilk 11y ago
  > I'm slightly surprised BitBucket is not doing the same, but their Atlassian masters seem more interested in pushing irrelevant features at the moment Yeah, I fear Bitbucket will always be shackled to the rest of the Atlassian product line, and never really allowed to innovate much.
  - yapdoggydog 11y ago
    Hey, Kelvin from Atlassian here. We are pretty flat out ourselves improving both Bitbucket Cloud and Server. I can see how SSO isn't terribly important if Bitbucket is the only one of our products you use, but it's critical for our customers who co-own Bitbucket and JIRA (or Confluence, or HipChat, etc.). It was a fairly massive undertaking: retrofitting auth across our portfolio of products took some serious engineering effort. But we've still managed to squeeze a few fairly large releases out recently shipping features such as smart mirroring, Git LFS, and clustering - and have some other great stuff in the pipeline.
    - godzillabrennus 11y ago
      Hi Kelvin, Any chance BitBucket has a public roadmap? I'm a user because of your free private repos, I hope to grow into a paid user this year. Thanks for all that you do!
      - 11y ago
dogweather 11y ago
GitLab has a ton of strengths, but still has large weaknesses in the area: gitlab.com implementation and design. gitlab.com is the public 'demo' version which people compare to github. It's missing a few key items that would make it appealing to open source developers (and that I'd like to see them prioritize.) E.g.: * Site search. It's been broken for months or possibly years. (Response time > 45 secs., Relevancy is miscalculated: "gitlab" itself does not appear in the search results.) * Repo / project discovery and social features are extremely primitive.
- sytse 11y ago
  I agree we can do a lot better in project discovery on GitLab.com. I do want to mention that https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=gitlab https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=gi... gives results in a few seconds and GitLab itself is the first hit.
  - sillysaurus3 11y ago
    Want any help? I don't have any interesting answers for your hiring filters. The culture you've built is very rare. I realized that if I felt that way, then I should try to help it become the norm.
    - sytse 11y ago
      We always want help, you can contribute directly or apply to work via http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html We take all applications seriously but if you feel you got rejected for a bad reason feel free to contact me directly.
      - Cogito 11y ago
        I think your link may be an errant copy paste :) I guess you meant to paste: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/
cmrx64 11y ago
For https://robigalia.org/ https://robigalia.org/, I decided to go with GitLab for a few reasons: 1. Free software needs free tools (I did not consider GitHub or Bitbucket at all). 2. Excellent team management and access control. 3. Excellent integration of their CI in the interface, with ability to run own build servers ("runners", in their jargon). This is critical, because setting up the toolchain needed to build takes some time, and I can use the beefy hardware I already have, without having to setup jenkins. 4. Lovely UI. The only real alternative in this space without setting up custom infrastructure is Savannah. Or, if willing to compromise on principles, GitHub, which has a lot of incremental downgrades compared to GitLab.
threatofrain 11y ago
The biggest feature that Github provides is its popularity as a central meeting ground for project discovery and collaboration. Some people are only looking for git hosting and don't care about the community aspect, so they could jump ship to Bitbucket or Gitlab. In that respect, if you're looking for a social network to keep in contact with a general group of people, Facebook is the way to go, and not the myriad of smaller sized social networks. If you're only looking for communication with a small group of people who haven't committed to anything, then you could jump ship to Google+ or whatever. Size of community is the salient feature, not the app.
- s986s 11y ago
  Facebook is not for me. Msybe its because most of mine freinds are party people. I feel very isolated. I rarely go on it and I find github the only social network I really care about. I feel as though its not really that social though since I only get to talk to people when I bring something to eat the table. Big node repos +1s, the I barely use the follow feature despite having access to some of the most prolific programmers of my time. I want a social programming network. No idea what it looks like, but github has definitely helped curb the isolated feeling. I havent played around with gitlab enough but Im sure it has more potential
sj4nz 11y ago
Personally, I have moved away from Github because I'm finding Gitlab Flow to be more useful. It enables collaborators to have a kind of Gerrit/Critic work-flow to review potential merges without having another system to integrate.
hobarrera 11y ago
> Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community Yes. They didn't just slap an open source licence onto their software, they actually follow an open source development mode, and work out in the open.

dudul 11y ago

I can't tell if there is a real shift, I would say no. GitHub, in a lot of people, is synonymous to Git. GitLab is superior in a lot of ways, more feature, open source, very open as you pointed out. Their pricing model supports free private repos. Not sure what it would take to really make people reconsider GitHub as the default goto place to host OSS repos.

x1024 11y ago
"GitHub failing hard". GitLab is great, but it's kind of a copycat project. Nothing wrong with that, it's just there really isn't a compelling reason to join beyond "less-predatory pricing". And the people who care about that use private repos, not OSS.
- dudul 11y ago
  For example, a lot of people complain about issues on GitHub. GitLab handles those much better, that could be a compelling reason to move, but somehow it doesn't seem to be enough. Private repo can be useful for early stage of OSS projects. Agreed though that it still feels too much like a clone of GitHub. The UI for example is way to close to the original.
  - stormbrew 11y ago
    Having used both there's more than enough in either that's bad to justify a switch to the other if you really want to. I personally prefer github's warts to gitlab's. In particular, I find that general site navigation on gitlab is quite tedious and it rarely centres useful information first. But that is very much a qualitative and not a quantitative complaint. The main thing I find extra useful on gitlab is the ability to mark a MR as a WIP.
    - sytse 11y ago
      Glad you like our WIP function. Do you maybe have any suggestions how we can make navigation better and/or examples of pages where you are missing information?
      - cyphar 11y ago
        The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive (sometimes what I want is in the sidebar but sometimes it's in the main page). For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar? And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use". And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it? This is something I feel GitHub does better -- things are much faster to access and IMO much more intuitive.
        sytse 11y ago
        Thanks, I've asked our UX engineer to look into this.
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        askyruler 11y ago
        Thank you for your feedback, we aware about these issues and already working on improvements on our side, stay tuned!
        randx 11y ago
        Thank you for your feedback. > The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body. > For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar? Good example. Agree its still non-intuitive in some places. For you particular example we created an issue to fix - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13480. > And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use" Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria. > And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it? You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences. P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
- dogweather 11y ago
  > predatory pricing I've always thought GitHub's pricing is awesome and very accessible. Can you explain?
  - nazgob 11y ago
    It'ss quite bad for my company. We have to pay per repo and we like to create quite a lot of small libs and microservices. I'd like to have a option of per user payment.
    - dogweather 11y ago
      Ah hah, that's interesting. Yep, the per-repo metric does weigh more heavily on architectures based on smaller more granular projects.
    - tedmiston 11y ago
      Very similar here. My startup is 3 years old with ~10-15 developers, but we make many small repos -- about 150 in that amount of time. Even though it's not tons of code, GitHub's pricing breaks down horribly in this case. I think that that in the long run many startups will move to embrace GitLab in the early days for price if nothing else.
  - x1024 11y ago
    Suppose you are a web agency. Every single project for every single client should be version-controlled, right? But that tends to quickly add up when using GitHub - about a dollar per project per month. So, if my company finishes 30 projects per year, we'd be paying $360/year to GitHub for what is essentially "storing a backup". And if we do this every year, that's $1000/year within 3 years. Not to mention that for "Organizations" the prices are doubled. For some reason. So... $2000/year? Right now the same job is done by a $5/mo linode, with the prospects of upgrading to $10/mo.
- typeformer 11y ago
  And also remember that you can host public repos for free too on Gitlab.com
tedmiston 11y ago
I believe every Techstars batch does a tools survey across batch companies (at least R/GA Techstars in NYC did) then emails everyone the summary with bar charts. The one I have is mostly about analytics, sales, and support tools, and unfortunately repository hosting wasn't a question asked. I also wish they would make this data source public so others could see shifts early -- for example the wave from HipChat to Slack would have been very visible. Perhaps StackShare might be the closest open source of similar data. http://stackshare.io/code-collaboration-version-control http://stackshare.io/code-collaboration-version-control

amelius 11y ago

I'm not sure if anyone can answer that question. Personally, I hope we can eventually move to a federated system, perhaps one based on ipfs.

hackbinary 11y ago
Well, ipfs sounds interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

toyg 11y ago

Github's shortcomings only really came to the fore in the last couple of months, due to a combination of factors. GitLab is working hard to exploit the current window of opportunity to make waves. I'm slightly surprised BitBucket is not doing the same, but their Atlassian masters seem more interested in pushing irrelevant features at the moment (like SSO across products I don't care about). It's too early to talk about a shift away from GH, but increased variety in the ecosystem can only be a good thing, compared to the dangers of a GH monoculture... especially considering git migrations are literally just one push to a new origin.

s_kilk 11y ago
> I'm slightly surprised BitBucket is not doing the same, but their Atlassian masters seem more interested in pushing irrelevant features at the moment Yeah, I fear Bitbucket will always be shackled to the rest of the Atlassian product line, and never really allowed to innovate much.
- yapdoggydog 11y ago
  Hey, Kelvin from Atlassian here. We are pretty flat out ourselves improving both Bitbucket Cloud and Server. I can see how SSO isn't terribly important if Bitbucket is the only one of our products you use, but it's critical for our customers who co-own Bitbucket and JIRA (or Confluence, or HipChat, etc.). It was a fairly massive undertaking: retrofitting auth across our portfolio of products took some serious engineering effort. But we've still managed to squeeze a few fairly large releases out recently shipping features such as smart mirroring, Git LFS, and clustering - and have some other great stuff in the pipeline.
  - godzillabrennus 11y ago
    Hi Kelvin, Any chance BitBucket has a public roadmap? I'm a user because of your free private repos, I hope to grow into a paid user this year. Thanks for all that you do!
    - 11y ago

dogweather 11y ago

GitLab has a ton of strengths, but still has large weaknesses in the area: gitlab.com implementation and design. gitlab.com is the public 'demo' version which people compare to github. It's missing a few key items that would make it appealing to open source developers (and that I'd like to see them prioritize.) E.g.: * Site search. It's been broken for months or possibly years. (Response time > 45 secs., Relevancy is miscalculated: "gitlab" itself does not appear in the search results.) * Repo / project discovery and social features are extremely primitive.

sytse 11y ago
I agree we can do a lot better in project discovery on GitLab.com. I do want to mention that https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=gitlab https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=gi... gives results in a few seconds and GitLab itself is the first hit.
- sillysaurus3 11y ago
  Want any help? I don't have any interesting answers for your hiring filters. The culture you've built is very rare. I realized that if I felt that way, then I should try to help it become the norm.
  - sytse 11y ago
    We always want help, you can contribute directly or apply to work via http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html http://doc.gitlab.com/ee/project_services/jira.html We take all applications seriously but if you feel you got rejected for a bad reason feel free to contact me directly.
    - Cogito 11y ago
      I think your link may be an errant copy paste :) I guess you meant to paste: https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/

cmrx64 11y ago

For https://robigalia.org/ https://robigalia.org/, I decided to go with GitLab for a few reasons: 1. Free software needs free tools (I did not consider GitHub or Bitbucket at all). 2. Excellent team management and access control. 3. Excellent integration of their CI in the interface, with ability to run own build servers ("runners", in their jargon). This is critical, because setting up the toolchain needed to build takes some time, and I can use the beefy hardware I already have, without having to setup jenkins. 4. Lovely UI. The only real alternative in this space without setting up custom infrastructure is Savannah. Or, if willing to compromise on principles, GitHub, which has a lot of incremental downgrades compared to GitLab.

threatofrain 11y ago

The biggest feature that Github provides is its popularity as a central meeting ground for project discovery and collaboration. Some people are only looking for git hosting and don't care about the community aspect, so they could jump ship to Bitbucket or Gitlab. In that respect, if you're looking for a social network to keep in contact with a general group of people, Facebook is the way to go, and not the myriad of smaller sized social networks. If you're only looking for communication with a small group of people who haven't committed to anything, then you could jump ship to Google+ or whatever. Size of community is the salient feature, not the app.

s986s 11y ago
Facebook is not for me. Msybe its because most of mine freinds are party people. I feel very isolated. I rarely go on it and I find github the only social network I really care about. I feel as though its not really that social though since I only get to talk to people when I bring something to eat the table. Big node repos +1s, the I barely use the follow feature despite having access to some of the most prolific programmers of my time. I want a social programming network. No idea what it looks like, but github has definitely helped curb the isolated feeling. I havent played around with gitlab enough but Im sure it has more potential

sj4nz 11y ago

Personally, I have moved away from Github because I'm finding Gitlab Flow to be more useful. It enables collaborators to have a kind of Gerrit/Critic work-flow to review potential merges without having another system to integrate.

hobarrera 11y ago

> Gitlab seems to be much more open about their development than Github, and has a real sense of community Yes. They didn't just slap an open source licence onto their software, they actually follow an open source development mode, and work out in the open.