25 ms·

GitLab Ultimate and Gold now free for education and open source

667 points by lunchbreak 8y ago

danieldk 8y ago
I think it is great that they are offering is, but it's a shame that students/lecturers/researchers cannot apply individually. GitHub and others work around the administrative load by checking the e-mail address against educational domains.
- Latty 8y ago
  I remember coming across someone (I think it was JetBrains, but don't quote me on that) using https://github.com/leereilly/swot https://github.com/leereilly/swot
- sergiomattei 8y ago
  I totally agree to this. As a student, I'd love to apply individually like on GitHub for the student pack.
- kiloreux 8y ago
  Not only that. But when I was a student and I live in a third world country where college won't give you an email address. GitHub was more than happy to accept my student certificate. It was very helpful of them. If we talk about countries like mine, then going through the administration way to get such thing is sort of fictional. We can barely make the administration handle our real absolutely necessary stuff. There are a lot of motivated students in my country and others that love this kind of things and if you are requiring the intervention of institution for setup, you might just not have offered it in the first place.
- sytse 8y ago
  Interesting idea. Is there an authoritative list of educational domains? Checking the last part of the domain name doesn't work in some countries like at my old university https://www.utwente.nl/ https://www.utwente.nl/ Also, my university gave me an alumni email address that I can still use today that has the same domain name.
  - jventura 8y ago
    Someone already posted below, but you can find a pretty good list at https://github.com/leereilly/swot/tree/master/lib/domains https://github.com/leereilly/swot/tree/master/lib/domains or on the Jetbrains fork at https://github.com/JetBrains/swot/tree/master/lib/domains https://github.com/JetBrains/swot/tree/master/lib/domains
    - sytse 8y ago
      Thanks, still not sure how to deal with people (becoming an) alumni.
      - audiolion 8y ago
        most common way I have seen is edu email address as the first pass, and a photo of a current student ID (this requires a human to check). Github lets me use my alumni account for the discount (I dont), their idea is if you want to abuse your alumni account you get 2 years free, and they just swallow that cost
  - 0xffff2 8y ago
    I think the second point is the more important one. I have no idea how prevalent it is, but my university lets me keep my original student address forever. You can't rely on even .edu addresses to ensure current academic affiliation.
  - eximius 8y ago
    Usually people just check if the domain is `.edu` since IIRC you need to be an accredited institution to acquire one. EDIT: University/Colleges only. Per wikipedia: "Since 2001, new registrants to the domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions of higher education;..." Many places that offer free tiers for 'education' only worry about that level of education and locale, anyway. (Not saying they should limit it to that, but many do.)
    - parthdesai 8y ago
- Shank 8y ago
  Honestly, I don't think it's as big of a deal. GitHub's student discount is all about giving students free private repositories for two years. Gitlab's is about adding more on top of that (private is free by default). There is a lot less urgency needed to setup a system for administering discounts like GitHub did for this reason. They could probably just benefit from making it more clear that private repositories are free for students (even though they're free for everybody), no verification needed. If they reword it like that, it's basically saying "we're not even going to make you verify that you're a student and you get a great deal."
super_trooper 8y ago
So is GitLab the new GitHub for opensource?
- sotojuan 8y ago
  Doubt it, in the long run. I also question the move from one VC-backed company to another unless you're only using their self hosted options (though I guess being open source is better).
- duiker101 8y ago
  Why is BitBucket not being kept in consideration with this move?
  - minitech 8y ago
    Probably because Bitbucket is a terrible product. It has the worst interface of the group, and less-than-minimal support for pull requests (comments disappear when unrelated changes are made, aren’t easy to browse, aren’t related to a review; only options are approve and permanently close; code expansion doesn’t work past a certain point, and doesn’t work at all if the pull request comes from a repo you don’t have access to even though you could just merge the pull request and get it). Also required users making private forks of paid-for organization private repos to pay again to give access to all team members at once last time I used it, but I guess that’s not relevant for open-source migration.
    - qw 8y ago
      > only options are approve and permanently close You can also mark it as «Need work».
      - minitech 8y ago
        Oh, nice. (This didn’t exist back when my team was on Bitbucket, sorry for the outdated info.)
  - naikrovek 8y ago
samaysharma 8y ago
"It has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we've seen a 7x increase in orders." That's quite an impact!
- ivl 8y ago
  Sounds like quite an overreaction to the MS purchase of GitHub. Good for GitLab, though, they certainly deserve the extra traffic.
  - mjw1007 8y ago
    I think it's likely that there are fair number of people who were already thinking "I should probably move to GitLab one day", and have taken the recent announcement as a reason to actually get round to it (rather than being directly motivated by disgust for Microsoft or similar).
    - bovermyer 8y ago
      I fall into this camp. I'm not particularly bothered by Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, but I've been eyeing GitLab for awhile now. This just gave me an excuse to pull the trigger.
  - behringer 8y ago
    It's not an overreaction. MS sucks, they ruin everything they touch. Move to gitlab with literally one button, move on with your life like nothing happened. What's not to like?
    - briandear 8y ago
      What’s not to like? Moving to GitLab. I actually like Github. It works and works well. Change for change sake is a bad motivation for such a critical part of software development. If MS “ruins” Github, then I could move then right? Because it’s so easy? Right now, Github isn’t ruined, so what is so compelling about moving now? I am failing to see the emergency. What happens if GitLab is bought by someone else we don’t like? Do we move again? It’s tiring to keep up with all of the things about which we should be outraged. I just want a rock solid product that works. GitHub does that, so what is so compelling about moving to GitLab?
herogreen 8y ago
While I enjoy my free gitlab.com account, I would prefer to use a version of Gitlab that is 100% open-source. This in order to not feel trapped the day they are bought by a bigger actor. I hope they will allow such an option.
- naikrovek 8y ago
  You may be interested in Gitea or Gogs, then. Open source GitHub-like things. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and has more features. Written in Golang. Worth a look, perhaps.
  - lucb1e 8y ago
    Installed Gitea on a potato yesterday, can confirm it works great. Gitlab wants 2 cores and 4GB RAM at minimum, Gitea runs on my old Intel Atom based laptop with negligible RAM usage. Gitea had a lot more pull requests merged and issues opened than Gogs, so it seems to me they're the more active of the two. (See for yourself: go to both Github repositories, hit 'insights' and check the past month.) Gitea was apparently forked because they wanted more community driven development rather than by one person.
- prophesi 8y ago
  You can self-host the community edition, which is open-source under MIT.
  - herogreen 8y ago
    @naikrovek, @prophesi: I know about these solutions but I would like to avoid having to self-host, because of time.
    - jonathonf 8y ago
      If I'm reading that right, "I want a hosted service which is free-libre and free-beer, and don't want the provider to charge or be acquired by a company, and don't want to do anything other than consume their service." How exactly is that a sustainable model?
nik736 8y ago
Without sounding too negative, in its current state I wouldn't even want to use GitLab for free. I applaud them for this move, but I simply don't understand how a company that employs that many people and that redesigsn its entire software the 3rd? 4th? time still has a complete usability mess at its hands.
- kraftman 8y ago
  What don't you like about it? I had to use it at my last company and was very impressed all-round.
  - djsumdog 8y ago
    Same here. We self hosted the community edition and could even auth to ldap. Gitlab CI worked well, ran tasks in docker containers, and did multi pipeline builds (although Jenkins does that now too and their Jenkinsfile is way better than gitlab-ci.yml) I'm not sure about the people who had to admin it, but for us devs it worked really well
    - knownothing 8y ago
      None of the things you listed are focused on usability, which is what OP complained about. Liking some isolated features of a product doesn't mean it's easy to use/understand or well-designed.
      - djsumdog 8y ago
        Well OP didn't mention any specifics, which is what we're asking for. I mean those were isolated features that I liked, but in general I liked the UI too. I was just mentioning specifics. I mean the merge request cycle works well (way better than BitBucket or Gerrit). Sure the initial project screens could use a little work (show the files instead of the readme/project info?) but in general I think the UI is decent, especially compared to BitBucket. Needing some improvements is different than being a "complete mess." It could be improved sure, but I don't think the current UI gets in the way of my development in significant ways.
dudus 8y ago
Time to capitalize on the senseless sudden hate for gitHub
- djsumdog 8y ago
  There is plenty of hate to go around. :-P I kinda want to try Fossil now.
- solarkraft 8y ago
  Microsoft does have a terrible history regarding open source. Github felt safe before, a neutral ground for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon all come together and share their love for code and just code. Not so much anymore. The hate is over-blown, but it does feel weird now. With a knowledge of Microsoft products I can understand why many people would see a bleak future ahead [0]. [0]: Relevant image going around the internet: https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/1528185357874.jpg https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/152818...
  - ssijak 8y ago
    Why not just first wait for their actual moves before spreading panic. I don`t love microsoft and use 0 of their software/hardware products but I don`t believe they will ruin Github. It would ruin their reputation with developers to a very large degree. But if they do, it is so easy to switch, that I do not see the point in "all hell broke loose" panic attacks before anything actually happened.
    - user5994461 8y ago
      The move is already done. The big companies can't host their projects on their main competitor, they will start migrating soon enough.
      - ssijak 8y ago
        "already done" and "start migrating soon enough" does not sound like same timeframes
akerro 8y ago
Can I self host gitlab gold with my 20 opensource projects but with 2 non-opensource because these are my experiments with stuff I dont want to show and get indexed by search engines? @sytse: congratulations on that move :)
- herogreen 8y ago
  Do you know that gitlab.com already offers free private repos ? If you do, what are the features from this gold version that you are currently missing with the free version ?
  - goda90 8y ago
    I think it's a question of does signing up for gold for open source repos exhaust his free repos from the base version?
    - Snappy 8y ago
      Definitely not. Presumably the gold subscription would be associated with a group for your open source projects, and your personal private projects would be completely separate (and free, just with Core functionality).
  - akerro 8y ago
    Yes, I know. I started using gitlab.com in 2014, I have there all my projects, my side projects, failed startup, assignments from uni, notes from lectures and own experiments, CV in Latex etc. Some of them I keep private, some of them are opensource. I enjoy hosting things myself, so my question is basically, can I replicate gitlab.com for my opensource projects, but keep privacy of my existing private projects.
- courtlandia 8y ago
  Courtland from GitLab here. GitLab hosts the gold plan on GitLab.com, but GitLab Ultimate has comparable features and you can self-host that. Both GitLab Gold and GitLab Ultimate are free for open source maintainers. I could see why you (and other open source maintainers) would also need a private project or two. I'll get that discussion going internally at GitLab.
atonse 8y ago
(I promise this will turn out favorable for gitlab) When gitlab first came out, I found the amount of shameful copying of github distasteful. I thought, man these guys have not done an ounce of anything original, so what's the point in even encouraging this kind of slimyness? But then Github stagnated, and stagnated some more. And gitlab went past the initial copying and started innovating and adding more features. And now with their CI/CD, and fully integrated pipeline, they seem to be way, way ahead of Github, whereas Github seems to have focused more on handling the infrastructure needed for their sheer level of scale. In Github's case, I bet they felt their hands were tied because they had a whole ecosystem around them (like all the CI/CD companies that tightly integrate). Gitlab didn't have that issue, and was free to integrate to their heart's content. To be honest, the only reason I moved back to Github after trying Gitlab a couple years ago was the performance. But again, Gitlab seems to be the little engine that keeps chugging. They have a certain hunger about them to improve, that they're constantly and relentlessly chipping away at the software's flaws. And sytse is always active in all these threads armed with great answers to pretty much every single criticism leveled at them. So at least for now, they seem to be a lot more hungry than Github, so kudos to them. Once all this hubbub dies down, I may move all my repos to Gitlab, but mostly for the CI/CD pipeline. Github has totally earned their success, but they did seem to be stagnating for a while there.
- knownothing 8y ago
  GitHub is popular because it allows developers to connect the tools they want to use to their repository. Some people find having everything in one package convenient, but the truth is there are better tools for most everything GitLab does. I don't see how jamming everything into one application makes it appealing. I prefer GitHub's approach of allowing applications to deliver more information back into GitHub https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ As the tooling we use becomes more complicated that will be the winning strategy.
  - atonse 8y ago
    GitHub is popular because it's popular. A lot of it is network effects. As far as I can remember, they were the first user-friendly git web host. (Key being user-friendly). GitHub has also been really great at giving back to the community (in ways that even GitLab has benefited I'm sure). But I doubt the source of their popularity is the integration, although their robust APIs have made the ecosystem around them flourish.
koolba 8y ago
> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects. Okay that sounds good though I can't figure out what "Gold" is as their pricing page only mentions "Core" / "Starter" / "Premium" / "Ultimate": https://about.gitlab.com/pricing https://about.gitlab.com/pricing EDIT: Nevermind ... the metallic plans are for the hosted SaaS offering which doesn't show up by default on the pricing page with JS disabled. > Open source projects: any project that uses a standard open source licence and is non-commercial. I get the idea that GitLab wants to offer something to FOSS projects but restricting things to "Non-commerical" is both vague and limiting. Would Spring qualify? It's open source but backed by a commercial entity. How about Redis? Open source with multiple companies offering hosted variants. What about MySQL? It is GPL ... but you know Oracle... Also unless GitLab is going by the Queen's English "licence" is spelled wrong (should be an "s"). > Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. However, you can buy support for 95% off, at $4.95 per user per month. To purchase support, contact sales. So support is usually $100/user/month? Are there any takers at that price or is that the usual high ball so that you can offer a discount to the procurement department?
- francislavoie 8y ago
  Gold is here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com They have pricing for self-hosted, and pricing for gitlab.com (managed)
- manyoso 8y ago
  Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your project and insist you move to paid hosting. It's a scam.
  - lnrdgmz 8y ago
    They do define non-commercial. > It should not have paid support or paid contributors.
    - 8y ago
marenkay 8y ago
While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing... Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source? Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git, providing Git infrastructure for all those projects? It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure into the hands of any commercial entity.
- williamstein 8y ago
  You might be underestimating how hard such a thing is to create, and overestimating how well funded open source is...
  - marenkay 8y ago
    Neither of these, been in both situations. I just am kind of ashamed for us as developers that we can not manage to band together and solve the task. That is what is really troubling.
- aviau 8y ago
  I think that is is best to open pull requests to Gitlab instead. You may object and say that it is a bit lame to re-implement something that is already in the paid version. However, it is best than re-implementing everything from scratch. Also, I have heard that Gitlab is open to open-sourcing features when you show interest to have it in the free version. Take a look at this issue for example, which tracks Gnome's wishlist for Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566. The guys behind the Gitlab company move the community edition pretty fast too, possibly faster than what we would achieve by duplicating efforts. However, as I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209), this may change because the new free Ultimate/Gold subscriptions could become excuses to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.
shiado 8y ago
To those using Gitlab to escape Microsoft. You might want to check where Gitlab is hosted. I suggest you go the self-hosted route instead.
- justadudeama 8y ago
  Using a service that is hosted on azure is a lot different then a product owned by Microsoft.
  - iotku 8y ago
    To expand on this, Gitlab is currently hosted on Azure (Hello Microsoft) with current (now expedited) plans on shifting over to the Google Cloud Platform. https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...
benatkin 8y ago
Maybe they should change their Twitter bio. It leads with "GitLab is open source software" but if they move many of the users of the Community Edition to GitLab Ultimate, they will stop feeling the pain points of the Community Edition and too many core features will be Enterprise-only, and the Community Edition will fall into disuse.
aviau 8y ago
One downside to this announcement is that this may become an excuse to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE. We (Debian) use Gitlab (salsa.debian.org) but we wouldn't switch to the free Gold/Ultimate version because we don't want our infrastructure to run on proprietary software. It might be that the majority of free software projects accept to use the free subscription and therefore lower the pressure to add new features to Gitlab CE.
- sytse 8y ago
  As implied in the OP we understand that some projects (like Debian) are not comfortable running proprietary software. We'll continue to listen to their wishes. And the increasing adoption of GitLab open source by open source projects might lead to more contributions to the open source code base.
- ksec 8y ago
  Hopefully with all the Open Source switching to using Gitlab they would then have all the incentives to help make it even better and fast.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
imr_ 8y ago
fantastic move. perfect timing and opportunity.
Cypher 8y ago
Can a professor give me a gold access?
nyxtom 8y ago
This is a non-useful comment so feel free downvote, but the product offerings for GitLab sound ironically like Windows released product offerings.
- sytse 8y ago
  I must admit I did think of Windows Ultimate when I came up with that name :)
spicytunacone 8y ago
Awesome response. I signed up years ago because they do unlimited free private repos, though I wondered how they could afford to give so much away for free. While I can't find the exact statement now, I was affected somewhat by their dedication to always offering unlimited free repositories, believing that such access was along the lines of a "digital right". Obviously there's strategy to all of this, but following them all this time it's nice to believe that perhaps the top of the organization still believe in that goal too.
zamalek 8y ago
I like this. I just don't know if it's a smart idea. Some threads since the announcement have complained about the performance of Gitlab (in varying ways, from website to CI). Is providing free access to an overloaded system really the best course? Will this negativity impact paying customers? This is the right thing to do, but preparation might have been a good first step.
- brodock 8y ago
  The offer is valid for both the SaaS and for On-Premise installations. (Gold refers to the SaaS plan, and Ultimate is the license level for on-premise)
- behringer 8y ago
  I've seen no comments of gitlabs recent performance. Performance today may be very different from a year or two ago when all these opinions were formed.

667 points by lunchbreak 8y ago

I think it is great that they are offering is, but it's a shame that students/lecturers/researchers cannot apply individually. GitHub and others work around the administrative load by checking the e-mail address against educational domains.

Latty 8y ago
I remember coming across someone (I think it was JetBrains, but don't quote me on that) using https://github.com/leereilly/swot https://github.com/leereilly/swot
sergiomattei 8y ago
I totally agree to this. As a student, I'd love to apply individually like on GitHub for the student pack.
kiloreux 8y ago
Not only that. But when I was a student and I live in a third world country where college won't give you an email address. GitHub was more than happy to accept my student certificate. It was very helpful of them. If we talk about countries like mine, then going through the administration way to get such thing is sort of fictional. We can barely make the administration handle our real absolutely necessary stuff. There are a lot of motivated students in my country and others that love this kind of things and if you are requiring the intervention of institution for setup, you might just not have offered it in the first place.
sytse 8y ago
Interesting idea. Is there an authoritative list of educational domains? Checking the last part of the domain name doesn't work in some countries like at my old university https://www.utwente.nl/ https://www.utwente.nl/ Also, my university gave me an alumni email address that I can still use today that has the same domain name.
- jventura 8y ago
  Someone already posted below, but you can find a pretty good list at https://github.com/leereilly/swot/tree/master/lib/domains https://github.com/leereilly/swot/tree/master/lib/domains or on the Jetbrains fork at https://github.com/JetBrains/swot/tree/master/lib/domains https://github.com/JetBrains/swot/tree/master/lib/domains
  - sytse 8y ago
    Thanks, still not sure how to deal with people (becoming an) alumni.
    - audiolion 8y ago
      most common way I have seen is edu email address as the first pass, and a photo of a current student ID (this requires a human to check). Github lets me use my alumni account for the discount (I dont), their idea is if you want to abuse your alumni account you get 2 years free, and they just swallow that cost
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  I think the second point is the more important one. I have no idea how prevalent it is, but my university lets me keep my original student address forever. You can't rely on even .edu addresses to ensure current academic affiliation.
- eximius 8y ago
  Usually people just check if the domain is `.edu` since IIRC you need to be an accredited institution to acquire one. EDIT: University/Colleges only. Per wikipedia: "Since 2001, new registrants to the domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions of higher education;..." Many places that offer free tiers for 'education' only worry about that level of education and locale, anyway. (Not saying they should limit it to that, but many do.)
  - parthdesai 8y ago
Shank 8y ago
Honestly, I don't think it's as big of a deal. GitHub's student discount is all about giving students free private repositories for two years. Gitlab's is about adding more on top of that (private is free by default). There is a lot less urgency needed to setup a system for administering discounts like GitHub did for this reason. They could probably just benefit from making it more clear that private repositories are free for students (even though they're free for everybody), no verification needed. If they reword it like that, it's basically saying "we're not even going to make you verify that you're a student and you get a great deal."

super_trooper 8y ago

So is GitLab the new GitHub for opensource?

sotojuan 8y ago
Doubt it, in the long run. I also question the move from one VC-backed company to another unless you're only using their self hosted options (though I guess being open source is better).
duiker101 8y ago
Why is BitBucket not being kept in consideration with this move?
- minitech 8y ago
  Probably because Bitbucket is a terrible product. It has the worst interface of the group, and less-than-minimal support for pull requests (comments disappear when unrelated changes are made, aren’t easy to browse, aren’t related to a review; only options are approve and permanently close; code expansion doesn’t work past a certain point, and doesn’t work at all if the pull request comes from a repo you don’t have access to even though you could just merge the pull request and get it). Also required users making private forks of paid-for organization private repos to pay again to give access to all team members at once last time I used it, but I guess that’s not relevant for open-source migration.
  - qw 8y ago
    > only options are approve and permanently close You can also mark it as «Need work».
    - minitech 8y ago
      Oh, nice. (This didn’t exist back when my team was on Bitbucket, sorry for the outdated info.)
- naikrovek 8y ago

samaysharma 8y ago

"It has been a crazy 24 hours for GitLab. More than 2,000 people tweeted about #movingtogitlab. We imported over 100,000 repositories, and we've seen a 7x increase in orders." That's quite an impact!

ivl 8y ago
Sounds like quite an overreaction to the MS purchase of GitHub. Good for GitLab, though, they certainly deserve the extra traffic.
- mjw1007 8y ago
  I think it's likely that there are fair number of people who were already thinking "I should probably move to GitLab one day", and have taken the recent announcement as a reason to actually get round to it (rather than being directly motivated by disgust for Microsoft or similar).
  - bovermyer 8y ago
    I fall into this camp. I'm not particularly bothered by Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub, but I've been eyeing GitLab for awhile now. This just gave me an excuse to pull the trigger.
- behringer 8y ago
  It's not an overreaction. MS sucks, they ruin everything they touch. Move to gitlab with literally one button, move on with your life like nothing happened. What's not to like?
  - briandear 8y ago
    What’s not to like? Moving to GitLab. I actually like Github. It works and works well. Change for change sake is a bad motivation for such a critical part of software development. If MS “ruins” Github, then I could move then right? Because it’s so easy? Right now, Github isn’t ruined, so what is so compelling about moving now? I am failing to see the emergency. What happens if GitLab is bought by someone else we don’t like? Do we move again? It’s tiring to keep up with all of the things about which we should be outraged. I just want a rock solid product that works. GitHub does that, so what is so compelling about moving to GitLab?

herogreen 8y ago

While I enjoy my free gitlab.com account, I would prefer to use a version of Gitlab that is 100% open-source. This in order to not feel trapped the day they are bought by a bigger actor. I hope they will allow such an option.

naikrovek 8y ago
You may be interested in Gitea or Gogs, then. Open source GitHub-like things. Gitea is a fork of Gogs and has more features. Written in Golang. Worth a look, perhaps.
- lucb1e 8y ago
  Installed Gitea on a potato yesterday, can confirm it works great. Gitlab wants 2 cores and 4GB RAM at minimum, Gitea runs on my old Intel Atom based laptop with negligible RAM usage. Gitea had a lot more pull requests merged and issues opened than Gogs, so it seems to me they're the more active of the two. (See for yourself: go to both Github repositories, hit 'insights' and check the past month.) Gitea was apparently forked because they wanted more community driven development rather than by one person.
prophesi 8y ago
You can self-host the community edition, which is open-source under MIT.
- herogreen 8y ago
  @naikrovek, @prophesi: I know about these solutions but I would like to avoid having to self-host, because of time.
  - jonathonf 8y ago
    If I'm reading that right, "I want a hosted service which is free-libre and free-beer, and don't want the provider to charge or be acquired by a company, and don't want to do anything other than consume their service." How exactly is that a sustainable model?

nik736 8y ago

Without sounding too negative, in its current state I wouldn't even want to use GitLab for free. I applaud them for this move, but I simply don't understand how a company that employs that many people and that redesigsn its entire software the 3rd? 4th? time still has a complete usability mess at its hands.

kraftman 8y ago
What don't you like about it? I had to use it at my last company and was very impressed all-round.
- djsumdog 8y ago
  Same here. We self hosted the community edition and could even auth to ldap. Gitlab CI worked well, ran tasks in docker containers, and did multi pipeline builds (although Jenkins does that now too and their Jenkinsfile is way better than gitlab-ci.yml) I'm not sure about the people who had to admin it, but for us devs it worked really well
  - knownothing 8y ago
    None of the things you listed are focused on usability, which is what OP complained about. Liking some isolated features of a product doesn't mean it's easy to use/understand or well-designed.
    - djsumdog 8y ago
      Well OP didn't mention any specifics, which is what we're asking for. I mean those were isolated features that I liked, but in general I liked the UI too. I was just mentioning specifics. I mean the merge request cycle works well (way better than BitBucket or Gerrit). Sure the initial project screens could use a little work (show the files instead of the readme/project info?) but in general I think the UI is decent, especially compared to BitBucket. Needing some improvements is different than being a "complete mess." It could be improved sure, but I don't think the current UI gets in the way of my development in significant ways.

dudus 8y ago

Time to capitalize on the senseless sudden hate for gitHub

djsumdog 8y ago
There is plenty of hate to go around. :-P I kinda want to try Fossil now.
solarkraft 8y ago
Microsoft does have a terrible history regarding open source. Github felt safe before, a neutral ground for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon all come together and share their love for code and just code. Not so much anymore. The hate is over-blown, but it does feel weird now. With a knowledge of Microsoft products I can understand why many people would see a bleak future ahead [0]. [0]: Relevant image going around the internet: https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/1528185357874.jpg https://desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/g/image/1528/18/152818...
- ssijak 8y ago
  Why not just first wait for their actual moves before spreading panic. I don`t love microsoft and use 0 of their software/hardware products but I don`t believe they will ruin Github. It would ruin their reputation with developers to a very large degree. But if they do, it is so easy to switch, that I do not see the point in "all hell broke loose" panic attacks before anything actually happened.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    The move is already done. The big companies can't host their projects on their main competitor, they will start migrating soon enough.
    - ssijak 8y ago
      "already done" and "start migrating soon enough" does not sound like same timeframes

akerro 8y ago

Can I self host gitlab gold with my 20 opensource projects but with 2 non-opensource because these are my experiments with stuff I dont want to show and get indexed by search engines? @sytse: congratulations on that move :)

herogreen 8y ago
Do you know that gitlab.com already offers free private repos ? If you do, what are the features from this gold version that you are currently missing with the free version ?
- goda90 8y ago
  I think it's a question of does signing up for gold for open source repos exhaust his free repos from the base version?
  - Snappy 8y ago
    Definitely not. Presumably the gold subscription would be associated with a group for your open source projects, and your personal private projects would be completely separate (and free, just with Core functionality).
- akerro 8y ago
  Yes, I know. I started using gitlab.com in 2014, I have there all my projects, my side projects, failed startup, assignments from uni, notes from lectures and own experiments, CV in Latex etc. Some of them I keep private, some of them are opensource. I enjoy hosting things myself, so my question is basically, can I replicate gitlab.com for my opensource projects, but keep privacy of my existing private projects.
courtlandia 8y ago
Courtland from GitLab here. GitLab hosts the gold plan on GitLab.com, but GitLab Ultimate has comparable features and you can self-host that. Both GitLab Gold and GitLab Ultimate are free for open source maintainers. I could see why you (and other open source maintainers) would also need a private project or two. I'll get that discussion going internally at GitLab.

atonse 8y ago

(I promise this will turn out favorable for gitlab) When gitlab first came out, I found the amount of shameful copying of github distasteful. I thought, man these guys have not done an ounce of anything original, so what's the point in even encouraging this kind of slimyness? But then Github stagnated, and stagnated some more. And gitlab went past the initial copying and started innovating and adding more features. And now with their CI/CD, and fully integrated pipeline, they seem to be way, way ahead of Github, whereas Github seems to have focused more on handling the infrastructure needed for their sheer level of scale. In Github's case, I bet they felt their hands were tied because they had a whole ecosystem around them (like all the CI/CD companies that tightly integrate). Gitlab didn't have that issue, and was free to integrate to their heart's content. To be honest, the only reason I moved back to Github after trying Gitlab a couple years ago was the performance. But again, Gitlab seems to be the little engine that keeps chugging. They have a certain hunger about them to improve, that they're constantly and relentlessly chipping away at the software's flaws. And sytse is always active in all these threads armed with great answers to pretty much every single criticism leveled at them. So at least for now, they seem to be a lot more hungry than Github, so kudos to them. Once all this hubbub dies down, I may move all my repos to Gitlab, but mostly for the CI/CD pipeline. Github has totally earned their success, but they did seem to be stagnating for a while there.

knownothing 8y ago
GitHub is popular because it allows developers to connect the tools they want to use to their repository. Some people find having everything in one package convenient, but the truth is there are better tools for most everything GitLab does. I don't see how jamming everything into one application makes it appealing. I prefer GitHub's approach of allowing applications to deliver more information back into GitHub https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ https://blog.github.com/2018-05-07-introducing-checks-api/ As the tooling we use becomes more complicated that will be the winning strategy.
- atonse 8y ago
  GitHub is popular because it's popular. A lot of it is network effects. As far as I can remember, they were the first user-friendly git web host. (Key being user-friendly). GitHub has also been really great at giving back to the community (in ways that even GitLab has benefited I'm sure). But I doubt the source of their popularity is the integration, although their robust APIs have made the ecosystem around them flourish.

koolba 8y ago

> Today, we're excited to announce that GitLab Ultimate and Gold are now free for educational institutions and open source projects. Okay that sounds good though I can't figure out what "Gold" is as their pricing page only mentions "Core" / "Starter" / "Premium" / "Ultimate": https://about.gitlab.com/pricing https://about.gitlab.com/pricing EDIT: Nevermind ... the metallic plans are for the hosted SaaS offering which doesn't show up by default on the pricing page with JS disabled. > Open source projects: any project that uses a standard open source licence and is non-commercial. I get the idea that GitLab wants to offer something to FOSS projects but restricting things to "Non-commerical" is both vague and limiting. Would Spring qualify? It's open source but backed by a commercial entity. How about Redis? Open source with multiple companies offering hosted variants. What about MySQL? It is GPL ... but you know Oracle... Also unless GitLab is going by the Queen's English "licence" is spelled wrong (should be an "s"). > Free GitLab Ultimate and Gold accounts do not include support. However, you can buy support for 95% off, at $4.95 per user per month. To purchase support, contact sales. So support is usually $100/user/month? Are there any takers at that price or is that the usual high ball so that you can offer a discount to the procurement department?

francislavoie 8y ago
Gold is here: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#gitlab-com They have pricing for self-hosted, and pricing for gitlab.com (managed)
manyoso 8y ago
Notice they do not define "non-commercial" at all so could at anytime decide that someone somewhere is making money off your project or by using your project and insist you move to paid hosting. It's a scam.
- lnrdgmz 8y ago
  They do define non-commercial. > It should not have paid support or paid contributors.
  - 8y ago

marenkay 8y ago

While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing... Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source? Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git, providing Git infrastructure for all those projects? It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure into the hands of any commercial entity.

williamstein 8y ago
You might be underestimating how hard such a thing is to create, and overestimating how well funded open source is...
- marenkay 8y ago
  Neither of these, been in both situations. I just am kind of ashamed for us as developers that we can not manage to band together and solve the task. That is what is really troubling.
aviau 8y ago
I think that is is best to open pull requests to Gitlab instead. You may object and say that it is a bit lame to re-implement something that is already in the paid version. However, it is best than re-implementing everything from scratch. Also, I have heard that Gitlab is open to open-sourcing features when you show interest to have it in the free version. Take a look at this issue for example, which tracks Gnome's wishlist for Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566. The guys behind the Gitlab company move the community edition pretty fast too, possibly faster than what we would achieve by duplicating efforts. However, as I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209), this may change because the new free Ultimate/Gold subscriptions could become excuses to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.

shiado 8y ago

To those using Gitlab to escape Microsoft. You might want to check where Gitlab is hosted. I suggest you go the self-hosted route instead.

justadudeama 8y ago
Using a service that is hosted on azure is a lot different then a product owned by Microsoft.
- iotku 8y ago
  To expand on this, Gitlab is currently hosted on Azure (Hello Microsoft) with current (now expedited) plans on shifting over to the Google Cloud Platform. https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abandoned-microsoft-azure-for-google-cloud/ https://venturebeat.com/2018/04/06/why-and-how-gitlab-abando...

benatkin 8y ago

Maybe they should change their Twitter bio. It leads with "GitLab is open source software" but if they move many of the users of the Community Edition to GitLab Ultimate, they will stop feeling the pain points of the Community Edition and too many core features will be Enterprise-only, and the Community Edition will fall into disuse.

aviau 8y ago

One downside to this announcement is that this may become an excuse to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE. We (Debian) use Gitlab (salsa.debian.org) but we wouldn't switch to the free Gold/Ultimate version because we don't want our infrastructure to run on proprietary software. It might be that the majority of free software projects accept to use the free subscription and therefore lower the pressure to add new features to Gitlab CE.

sytse 8y ago
As implied in the OP we understand that some projects (like Debian) are not comfortable running proprietary software. We'll continue to listen to their wishes. And the increasing adoption of GitLab open source by open source projects might lead to more contributions to the open source code base.
ksec 8y ago
Hopefully with all the Open Source switching to using Gitlab they would then have all the incentives to help make it even better and fast.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

imr_ 8y ago

fantastic move. perfect timing and opportunity.

Cypher 8y ago

Can a professor give me a gold access?

nyxtom 8y ago

This is a non-useful comment so feel free downvote, but the product offerings for GitLab sound ironically like Windows released product offerings.

sytse 8y ago
I must admit I did think of Windows Ultimate when I came up with that name :)

spicytunacone 8y ago

Awesome response. I signed up years ago because they do unlimited free private repos, though I wondered how they could afford to give so much away for free. While I can't find the exact statement now, I was affected somewhat by their dedication to always offering unlimited free repositories, believing that such access was along the lines of a "digital right". Obviously there's strategy to all of this, but following them all this time it's nice to believe that perhaps the top of the organization still believe in that goal too.

zamalek 8y ago

I like this. I just don't know if it's a smart idea. Some threads since the announcement have complained about the performance of Gitlab (in varying ways, from website to CI). Is providing free access to an overloaded system really the best course? Will this negativity impact paying customers? This is the right thing to do, but preparation might have been a good first step.

brodock 8y ago
The offer is valid for both the SaaS and for On-Premise installations. (Gold refers to the SaaS plan, and Ultimate is the license level for on-premise)
behringer 8y ago
I've seen no comments of gitlabs recent performance. Performance today may be very different from a year or two ago when all these opinions were formed.