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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

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?
    - herogreen 8y ago
      I do not ask for any more feature than they currently have in the free-libre version. I would not care if they were to be bought by X or Y. I am happy with them selling a non-free-libre version. Providing a basic free-libre, free-beer version that works and eventually wins other Github (free-beer version) would be very powerful marketing-wise.
      - prophesi 8y ago
        The feature you're asking for is free hosting and maintenance. It's a totally reasonable business model to supply that either through a paid-plan, or by hosting only the non-libre version of the software. As you've mentioned, hosting costs time, which is money. It also costs bandwidth and storage. That gets quite expensive when you're at the scale Gitlab is currently at.
        herogreen 8y ago
        I do not understand how that would require a change of their business model because they currently provide free hosting and maintenance for a version that I think has more features than the community edition.
        prophesi 8y ago
        It does have more features; they're banking on the fact that users who try out Gitlab will like those additional features, and thus will want to pay for the enterprise edition when their business decides to self-host. Though I will say that this can be a sneaky business model. Users might not realize some of the features they depend on in the gitlab.com version isn't from the community edition.
ovao 8y ago
If it's any comfort, GitLab's intention is to go IPO rather than to be acquired. Granted, what they intend and what actually transpires at some point may change.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > If it's any comfort, GitLab's intention is to go IPO rather than to be acquired. Not particularly reassuring since acquisitions of companies after they IPO happen all the time.
tambre 8y ago
You could always host the open-source variant (Community Edition) of GitLab on your server.
markovbot 8y ago
Is there any particular closed source component you have an issue with? I self host gitlab-ce and have yet to find something that I really wish I had, so I'm curious if I'm just missing something.
- herogreen 8y ago
  Actually I believe that I am not using any closed-source component (or else I would not have posted the parent). However I do not want to start using any by mistake.
  - markovbot 8y ago
    So self-host or use one of the many public gitlab-ce instances?
shandor 8y ago
We've been pretty happy with Phabricator. Its code review is miles ahead of the others, in my opinion, and other parts also work well for us. Of course, it's not a direct replacement, since they don't have free, centralized service like GitHub/Lab does. But, it's 100% open source and you can easily host it on a potato.
rvern 8y ago
There are public instances running GitLab CE at framagit.org and 0xacab.org.

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?
  - herogreen 8y ago
    I do not ask for any more feature than they currently have in the free-libre version. I would not care if they were to be bought by X or Y. I am happy with them selling a non-free-libre version. Providing a basic free-libre, free-beer version that works and eventually wins other Github (free-beer version) would be very powerful marketing-wise.
    - prophesi 8y ago
      The feature you're asking for is free hosting and maintenance. It's a totally reasonable business model to supply that either through a paid-plan, or by hosting only the non-libre version of the software. As you've mentioned, hosting costs time, which is money. It also costs bandwidth and storage. That gets quite expensive when you're at the scale Gitlab is currently at.
      - herogreen 8y ago
        I do not understand how that would require a change of their business model because they currently provide free hosting and maintenance for a version that I think has more features than the community edition.
        prophesi 8y ago
        It does have more features; they're banking on the fact that users who try out Gitlab will like those additional features, and thus will want to pay for the enterprise edition when their business decides to self-host. Though I will say that this can be a sneaky business model. Users might not realize some of the features they depend on in the gitlab.com version isn't from the community edition.

ovao 8y ago

If it's any comfort, GitLab's intention is to go IPO rather than to be acquired. Granted, what they intend and what actually transpires at some point may change.

ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> If it's any comfort, GitLab's intention is to go IPO rather than to be acquired. Not particularly reassuring since acquisitions of companies after they IPO happen all the time.

tambre 8y ago

You could always host the open-source variant (Community Edition) of GitLab on your server.

markovbot 8y ago

Is there any particular closed source component you have an issue with? I self host gitlab-ce and have yet to find something that I really wish I had, so I'm curious if I'm just missing something.

herogreen 8y ago
Actually I believe that I am not using any closed-source component (or else I would not have posted the parent). However I do not want to start using any by mistake.
- markovbot 8y ago
  So self-host or use one of the many public gitlab-ce instances?

shandor 8y ago

We've been pretty happy with Phabricator. Its code review is miles ahead of the others, in my opinion, and other parts also work well for us. Of course, it's not a direct replacement, since they don't have free, centralized service like GitHub/Lab does. But, it's 100% open source and you can easily host it on a potato.

rvern 8y ago

There are public instances running GitLab CE at framagit.org and 0xacab.org.