10 ms·

GitHub Alternatives

251 points by ChankeyPathak 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago
For all the complaints about Microsoft, I've yet to hear what they could do that would be so bad? Change the homepage to actually be useful? Improve the search? Give away free private repos?
- alkonaut 8y ago
  Kill Atom was the most reasonable fear I heard. And I can’t see how that wouldn’t be a well founded fear. If I was Microsoft I wouldn’t want to keep paying devs to make two so similar products (atom, code). They are much more similar than e.g code/vs or github/vsts. But even so: I agree the fear that the product will be worse in a few feels completely irrational. What I can agree with is that it’s unfortunate that it’s no longer seen as a neutral ground for development. It felt almost like a standard or like a piece of infrastructure, rather than a for-profit. But that was of course never the case. But now it becomes obvious, which might fracture the community (it was very nice to have everything in one place - e.g package managers literally started drawing stuff from github links). The appearance of neutrality and trust was the #1 feature of GitHub. Everything else is polish. Microsoft will have to work hard to keep the #1 feature working.
  - brightball 8y ago
    Kill Electron would be the bigger fear. I know a lot of people don’t like it, but it has enabled so many more applications for Linux that killing it would be a major blow.
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      But... vs code is based on electron too.
    - sfraise 8y ago
      We're actually working on 2 Electron apps for a very very large corporate client right now so how they handle Electron is definitely a concern for us.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Microsoft uses Electron for VS Code, SQL Operations Studio, Azure Storage Explorer, Teams Desktop, Skype, and many other tools, and it has major traction with Slack, the Github Desktop App, Discord, and many other big companies. It's not going anywhere.
    - Kipters 8y ago
      They have a bunch of Electron-based products (VS Code, Teams), it's unlikely they'd kill Electron
    - vxNsr 8y ago
      And by far the most unfounded fear. As others have said MS has tons of their own apps using electron, to kill it would be to shoot themselves in both arms.
    - ytpete 8y ago
      They could be pretty interested in shifting it away from Chromium an V8-based Node to something that uses platform webviews (Edge on Windows) and a platform-specific JS engine backing Node (ChakraCore on Windows). I believe they have posted open-source experimental forks in that direction in the past. That's very different from killing it, but it could make developing or supporting Electron apps more difficult - plus the fear that it could then start sliding down the slope of the Windows version getting more investment, eventually leading to the classic "it's best on Windows" embrace/extend platform lockin. I'm not betting on that being their play, but I could see how people would worry...
      - manigandham 8y ago
        The whole point of Electron is equal cross-platform abilities from a single code-base. Making it run "best on windows" is the complete opposite goal and rather silly considering they already have several native UI and app frameworks made for Windows.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    But what does neutrality even mean? It's the git protocol, what is there to make non-neutral?
    - alkonaut 8y ago
      Not influenced by any of the major software giants. That’s about it. Github is very little about git and mostly about the hub. The inertia is in the issue tracker, forks/stars/...
  - HelloNurse 8y ago
    I see simply a generic fear of Microsoft, with their history of destructive acquisitions and unpleasant marketing strategies, doing something bad to GitHub users: something only they could do (involving LinkedIn, Windows, Visual Studio, etc.) and/or something that the far more harmless original GitHub wouldn't have considered. From this point of view, speculation about what Microsoft could do is redundant; whatever they do, including nothing at all, will be considered suspect unless obviously harmful.
- avenius 8y ago
  My fears, in no particular order: - Worsen the usability of the site, introduce dark patterns - Steal users' code (it has been rumored to happen before) - Introduce mandatory usage of Microsoft accounts - Gain a competitive advantage by spying on competitors' private repos - Sell information about the users to the highest bidder
wolco 8y ago
I'm surprised by the lack of choices that are free non-self hosted
- ChankeyPathak 8y ago
  gitlab is on fire https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgId=1 https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgI...
  - DougBTX 8y ago
    From the imported projects graph, looks like there was a spike, then it settled back to normal.
    - notatoad 8y ago
      Normal only because the scale of the graph is totally skewed right now. Looking at actual values, it looks like they're currently at ~2400 projects imported per measuring increment, up from <100 per increment before the Microsoft rumours first popped up, and down from 24k in the big spike.
- geodel 8y ago
  Why non-self hosted is supposed to be free for non open source projects?
  - wolco 8y ago
    It doesn't have to be but I'm a little shocked no one is taking that end of the business.
- hawski 8y ago
  https://notabug.org/ https://notabug.org/ is a hosted gogs fork.
- itomato 8y ago
  Genuinely curious what features of a GitLab or GitHub equivalent you would require in a self-hosted scenario that 'git' doesn't provide?
vasilakisfil 8y ago
There is also Gitea: https://gitea.io https://gitea.io
- rapfaria 8y ago
  Before reading I was sure gitea would be mentioned right after gitlab.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  was suggested on #emacs
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  Is Gitea only self-hosted? Does anyone offer hosted Gitea?
- zzzeek 8y ago
  Thanks! gogs looked great until I was horrified it has no oauth plugin support?! gitea does. why the fork? seems awkward.
  - simcop2387 8y ago
    The fork happened years ago because Gogs was (not entirely sure of current status) managed by a single person who would disappear on the regular, leaving fixes and other things not merged for weeks. So it got forked by people who were contributing to Gogs, and I think that ended up pushing Gogs into more active development. Now the two projects are still very similar but diverged enough to have some important differences like the OAuth support in gitea and such.
    - zzzeek 8y ago
      oauth is a total no-brainer feature add. Years ago I abandoned Trac because I couldn't deal w/ the spam user accounts and oauth integration w/ github wasn't really a thing back then. gogs should really add this though already gitea seems like that's where this particular community has gone.
ninjamayo 8y ago
Gitlab it is then! Not sure what to do with all my Github tshirts now :)
- kotajacob 8y ago
  Burn them, then update all your projects on GitHub to have nothing but a readme with a link to the video :p
  - ninjamayo 8y ago
    Damn, that is a brilliant idea. Spread the word :)
- rixrax 8y ago
  I was going to point out that GitHub pages are so great for hosting static content that that alone keeps me in GitHub. But looks like GitLab already implements their equivalent. Too bad it looks like they don't handle enabling TLS/SSL for custom domains as conveniently as GitHub does (e.g. one click to enable and they will then get the cert through LetsEncrypt or something without me having to bother with getting it from a CA, renewals etc.) [1]. Already commented about this elsewhere, but if anyone from GitLab is reading, this thing would make any potential transition much more convenient for me. [1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_started_part_three.html#ssl-tls-certificates https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
  - nkantar 8y ago
    For what it's worth, I started using Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/) for my static sites a while ago, and it's been great. Automatic LE support is definitely one of my favorite features.
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  Give them away to homeless people, you'd love the irony, or simply send them to me (L/XL).
rkeene2 8y ago
There's also ChiselApp which is Free, and able to be Self-Hosted (Flint is the upstream repository -- ChiselApp is a styled Flint, without the rights to redistribute the theme).
aneutron 8y ago
Why are people jumping ship to lower quality services ? And I'm talking about unrecognizable brand names, because at least migrating to Gitlab or Bitbucket may be understandable in a way, but still an exageration in my opinion.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  Because now github is owned by a company that was formerly very hostile to open source software, and this company is magically not.
  - natmaster 8y ago
    Steve Ballmer is no longer CEO. Companies are run by people - they are not people.
    - craftyguy 8y ago
      And what makes you think 1) company culture is no longer a thing and 2) that microsoft won't swing back towards being openly hostile or worse, 'secretly hostile' towards open source software when someone else is at the healm? I hope time will prove me wrong, but this acquisition is literally the 'embrace' phase of E3. Next comes the 'extend'.
      - naspinski 8y ago
        Microsoft has shown themselves to be very pro-open-source in the last 5+ years. Just look at things like VS Code. Microsoft is just the Nickelback of software, its cool to hate on them for no real reason (any more).
      - kingosticks 8y ago
        Why would they acquire github just to turn on it and run it into the ground? You can do that if your users are locked-in or maybe you have a competing service but neither are the case here; there are numerous alternatives and it's pretty easy to switch, as we are already seeing. If they have anything but good intentions this would be just a giant waste of time/money.
MK_Dev 8y ago
"A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source." The quote is from 2001 as is Ballmer's quote. Closing the article due to its lack of objectivity.
- oneplane 8y ago
  Fixing an imago set by a guy calling open-source and Linux 'a cancer' is really hard. The last few years of changes doesn't magically wipe away that bitter taste, and the last 10-20 years doesn't magically make you forget the past.
  - untog 8y ago
    It's an interesting debate though. If the CEO and most of the major execs of a company have left, is it really worthwhile to factor statements made 17 years ago into your decision making process? Don't get me wrong, many will avoid MS-anything to punish them for their past conduct, which is a fair personal decision. But if you're trying to evaluate what MS will do in the future, I'm not sure how relevant 2001 is.
    - macinjosh 8y ago
      In my mind it is less about the people who made the statements or were there when the statements were made and more about whether the company has the same business model now that it did at the time.
    - pmichaud 8y ago
      I basically agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: > Maybe the relevant factor isn't whether the same people are in place, but rather that the process that selected those people at all, selected both the "linux is cancer" people, as well as the current people. And that process is the same as it was before, optimizing for the same things, and therefore it may try to undermine open source again, once the prevailing cultural winds shift again, regardless of which warm body is currently in the hot seat. It's a little more of a abstract argument, but I don't think it's insane to consider. So the debate then becomes about whether the process really is the same or not.
jjrh 8y ago
git init --bare
keithnz 8y ago
"A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source." Then quotes stuff from 18 years ago.... ok
- agumonkey 8y ago
  Some people still don't trust MS, even after the recent changes. Can't blame them
- kazinator 8y ago
  Microsoft still owes tons of people money for the "Microsoft tax": having to purchase Windows for hardware that only ever ran GNU/Linux.
chapati23 8y ago
Honest question: Besides more traction among the open source community, where do you feel GitHub is stronger than GitLab? I’m not affiliated with GitLab, however a little biased because we’re using GitLab instead of GitHub at our company. Feature-wise, It seems to me that GitLab is running circles around GitHub. Curious about other opinions.
- PascLeRasc 8y ago
  That's it, the open-source community is there. Performance doesn't really matter when there's tons of amazing projects being hosted in one place. If features were important, Gitlab would be more popular than Github.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Ehh, I think the community would move to a better site if there were distinguishing features. From a source-viewing and code-review perspective, they’re all more or less the same: basic.
- oneplane 8y ago
  The only reason some of my clients (of my own company) and some of the clients of my employer (so.. someone else's company) choose GitHub over GitLab is track record. GitLab isn't old enough with a long/stable enough track record to be considered on par. Feature- and functionality-wise, GitLab always wins. A small, but second reason some of my clients and workgroups choose GitHub is pure because of the brand name, but I suppose that could be thrown in together with track record or age.
- eknkc 8y ago
  I like GitHub's UI better. I'm not even sure what is the latest iteration of GitLab UI. They change it in every release and it's a mess. I still can't find stuff. Also, GitLab is slow. I'm sure that gitlab.com service would not way handle a fraction of GitHub's traffic without a complete rewrite or something like that. I like GitLab as we have a CE installation that we depend on and I want it to be successful (which it already is I think). However personally it feels worse than GitHub on casual use.
CGamesPlay 8y ago
I've never used Github for personal, closed-source projects, but if you have and want to switch to something that provides absolutely no features except git hosting, here are 3 I've used: - Keybase git: https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone (my preferred solution these days). - AWS CodeCommit: https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/ https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/ ("encrypted", but I don't know if AWS employees can access it). - Dropbox git remote: https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox (it's slow and unencrypted, but uses Dropbox).
- manigandham 8y ago
  All the major clouds offer repos, Google Cloud has free private ones with decent limits: https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/ https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/
minxomat 8y ago
There's also (Fedora) Pagure, available hosted at https://pagure.io/ https://pagure.io/, and it can be self-hosted. Though it's not quite as painless as gitea/gogs. Example of a more active project: https://pagure.io/mlocate https://pagure.io/mlocate
- AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
  Didn't know about that one, thanks! This further increases my appreciation of Fedora. Between this and the COPR hosting, you can really do some serious development for Fedora without paying a dime for hosting or distribution. That's awesome.
jordigh 8y ago
Also Kallithea. https://kallithea-scm.org/ https://kallithea-scm.org/ I guess it's a wiki so I could add it myself, but apparently you need a github account to edit this wiki?
hbcondo714 8y ago
Assembla's version control has been working well for me since 2011 https://www.assembla.com/ https://www.assembla.com/
- nreece 8y ago
  +1 for Assembla. Reliable service, and free private repos too.
jwilk 8y ago
Launchpad is not only for Bazaar. It supports Git, too: https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git
marcinkuzminski 8y ago
The list doesn't mention it, but i'd also put https://rhodecode.com/features https://rhodecode.com/features into there.
drev 8y ago
Microsoft has cancer* * source microsoft
ThatPlayer 8y ago
There's also BitBucket's Paid Self-Hosted option, for 10 users, and a one-time payment of 10$. It even has a docker image. https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=self-hosted https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=self-hosted https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/ https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/
- reificator 8y ago
  For those looking into this option, it is important to note that Bitbucket's self-hosted option is a separate codebase that started with no link to the cloud product. Previously it was called Stash but was later rebranded to Bitbucket to reduce confusion.
  - nickserv 8y ago
    Was not aware of this, thanks for the info. Do you know if their enterprise edition is based on cloud or server?
    - reificator 8y ago
      If you mean the Data-Centre edition, it's based on Stash. Otherwise I'm not sure I've heard of that. Here's the FAQ from when the change was made: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-rebrand-faq-779298912.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-r...
bpierre 8y ago
git-ssb, open source and decentralized: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256 https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...
sebringj 8y ago
This is equivalent to a knee-jerk reaction clearly following the MS purchase of Github. The Microsoft of today is vastly different. Example: I'm using VSCode on my Mac right now and it clearly is a better alternative to something like Atom and its open source. My best friend is the head of the bash initiative at MS as well and I pretty much hated MS before. Now its pretty cool so doesn't seem like a rational view anymore to be MS negative.
sergiotapia 8y ago
Here's a good comparison page of the three big ones. https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket Gitlab seems to be picking up the pace and gaining mindshare among developers. Freelancers I'm curious, would you switch and lose your repos' stars, PRs, fork counts? Those are actually a good marketing tool for potential customers since they see you are legitimate.
valeg 8y ago
I want also add https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent Cool concept.
manaskarekar 8y ago
Raspberry Pi running your own git server. https://blog.meinside.pe.kr/Gogs-on-Raspberry-Pi/ https://blog.meinside.pe.kr/Gogs-on-Raspberry-Pi/ https://hackernoon.com/create-your-own-git-server-using-raspberry-pi-and-gitlab-f64475901a66 https://hackernoon.com/create-your-own-git-server-using-rasp... https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-git-server/ https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-git-server/
napsterbr 8y ago
Thumbs up to Phabricator, a software imo very underrated. Absolutely recommend if you are not very fond of Gitlab (furthermore, Phabricator's performance has been really good in my experience)
- xellisx 8y ago
  I am definately going to look at this. Now if there were a self host cloud storage (nextcloud) that also did soure repository...
alkonaut 8y ago
I’m only half joking when I say VSTS is a pretty strong contender in the code+issues space, especially if you need more complex features for CI/CD. For obvious reasons it’s not a good option if you are switching from Github out of fear of Microsoft (which is presumably the reason it’s not listed in the article).
- outside1234 8y ago
  Free private repos too.
- ggg9990 8y ago
  The site is so fucking slow though.
dismantlethesun 8y ago
> A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source. Both quotes are from 2001. So rather than a "couple of years ago", it was seventeen years ago. Toddlers walking the earth at that time, are now college graduates and developers working at Microsoft. Let's not think its the exact same group of people who said both statements, even if the company name is unchanged.
- therein 8y ago
  > Toddlers walking the earth at that time, are now college graduates and developers working at Microsoft This is extremely true and people need to understand how important this point exactly is. I think we all agree that Microsoft will continue to exist even 50-60 years from now with the same exact name. They will have generations of programmers passed through their corporate structure with varying goals and opinions. Tu quoque stops making sense at such timescales.
stockkid 8y ago
I like the content but the website's scroll is somehow delayed and I'm unable to pinch zoom on my mobile device.
oaiey 8y ago
These are no alternatives. GitHub is a specialized social network with git hosting included.
- bauerd 8y ago
  Exactly this, feature comparisons completely miss the point imo. GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens. A CI/CD pipeline bolted on top or k8s integration do not replace the community that GitHub is home to.
  - pehmyth 8y ago
    "GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens." Simply false statement.
- manigandham 8y ago
  But there's no real stickiness there. Developers are not mainstream users who want a dumb UX like Facebook, they're perfectly capable of creating an account (if they don't already have one) and interacting with a project wherever it is. Most discussions are limited in scope to a project anyway so it's not like you need the whole site. What difference does it make to go visit issues on GitLab vs Github?
  - oaiey 8y ago
    There is stickiness. Low entry burden for contributer is the key point why huge projects use GitHub instead of other platforms. And me registering at dozen of platforms, reading the legal stuff, learning the platform,... And when I finally successful submit a one line patch (how: no idea) the maintainer has a fair 50% chance of dropping it. That is not what I will do. And I will not be alone :).
    - manigandham 8y ago
      What? You can do the exact same thing in GitLab or Bitbucket in the same exact few clicks. Fork, edit, submit PR, done. Have you used these other platforms?
duxup 8y ago
I'll leave GitHub when I have some issues that I can't resolve. By then everyone will have blazed the trail for me, maybe a coupe times. ;) Much like the United States.... all my stuff is there...
macinjosh 8y ago
I am a happy gitlab.com user. However, with all of this week's news I decided to see what it would take to run my own GitLab instance. I was surprised to find that on Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user. Any cheaper/smaller instances were to anemic to run GitLab at all. Seems like there are some performance issues to deal with there.
- maineldc 8y ago
  I run a small gitlab instance on a $14/mo OVH instance and have been quite happy. I used to run on the smaller version and it was still OK.
  - half-kh-hacker 8y ago
    For a small instance, I get away with running an instance of Gitea on a 2.49€/mo VPS.
- cobbzilla 8y ago
  GitLab is a Rails app, what did you expect? /s We use gitea (written in Go), it runs well on more modest hardware.
  - artursapek 8y ago
    Why the sarcasm? Rails is a pig.
    - ezrast 8y ago
      Probably because GitHub is also built on Rails.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      I wonder if there's a chance GitLab will be rewritten in a more efficient language.
mastrsushi 8y ago
Is everyone really leaving GitHub, or is this just like 2013 when everyone "left" Google for DuckDuckGo. This is pretty bad personally, I'm writing a webcrawler for the site. I plan on making it cross-website anyway, but it kinda sucks hearing this.
- skinnymuch 8y ago
  It does not appear to be the case that a ton of people are leaving GitHub. Gitlab is mentioned far and away more than all other alternatives combined and their GitHub importing I think is like ~100K repos imported since the Sunday rumors. A lot but nothing compared to the tens of millions of repos GitHub has overall.
parvenu74 8y ago
An alternative way of solving this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015 Pair that an open spec for something like Jira or a Kanban board and the concept of GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket+Jira could be commodity. Fossil isn't a bad idea as a general replacement for all of this too.
bmsleight_ 8y ago
I looked at lot of these alternatives, not many are eating their own dog food. Does not inspire me with confidence. * https://gitea.io/en-US/ https://gitea.io/en-US/ The code for gitea is on Github. https://github.com/go-gitea/ https://github.com/go-gitea/ * http://gitprep.yukikimoto.com/ http://gitprep.yukikimoto.com/ The code for gitprep is on Github https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/gitprep https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/gitprep * https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ Guess what ..... https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs
- hjek 8y ago
  I guess Gogs have an excuse, as they had to host the project somewhere, and perhaps they haven't started dog fooding because of migration difficulties, e.g. the issue tracker. But I wonder what's the excuse for Gitea as they're a pretty recent Gogs fork? They're both pretty amazing though: Self-contained binaries and less than 5 minutes setup time, so totally suitable for ad-hoc deployment.
  - dmach 8y ago
    He's keeping it real, going with Apache Allura.
  - reificator 8y ago
    Github also does not cost time and money to use for open source projects. I've used a few GoGS servers, but none of them were public. Hosting a public competitor to Github is a different set of skills to developing a self-hosted VCS server.
  - hjek 8y ago
    Here's an explanation: https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe
- exrook 8y ago
  I'd guess that this is more due to the popularity of GitHub among potential contributiors to these projects. I've seen it mentioned many times here on HN that a potential contributor may not want to put in the effort to create an account on another VCS provider or send a patch to a mailing list, whereas submitting a pull request on GitHub is a much less involved process for them, given that they likely already have an account and are familiar with the process. However you could definitely argue that given that the projects in question are alternatives to GitHub, a developer interested in contributing will likely be invested enough to sign up for the alternative service.
funwie 8y ago
If it is an alternative then it is probably not the best option. You and I use Github not because we don’t know the alternatives, but because Github is better
- cosmojg 8y ago
  That isn't true. As with most online services, people use Github over alternatives because of the network effect. It's where everyone goes because it's where everyone is.
wilcox 8y ago
Redmine is also missing from the list. https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/
pjmlp 8y ago
So much drama, I am really looking forward to what will happen if Microsoft ever gets hold of one of the major Linux distributions.
zorkw4rg 8y ago
the deep integration go has with github in particular seems more ridiculous then ever.
exabrial 8y ago
I never imagined in my lifetime Apple would become Microsoft and Microsoft would become Apple. Yet here we are.
whatever1 8y ago
Enough with this. Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella? Github was not a non-profit company. But you were willing to upload your private repo there. And somehow now it is problematic.
- itomato 8y ago
  >Enough with this. As if, Dad.
- shakna 8y ago
  > Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella? Microsoft has a history of being horrible and worse to the open source community. Now, they may be trying to change that, but GitHub didn't have that history. Microsoft have baggage, and well-deserved baggage, when it comes to the open source world. Can I trust that they won't go back to their old tricks in five years? I don't know. But that's how long I need to use an ecosystem to justify hitching my horse to it, right now. (As a management decision).
- O1111OOO 8y ago
  > And somehow now it is problematic. As far as I know, Github hasn't delivered a surveillance, keylogging Operating System. They haven't used deceptive practices in getting users to upgrade to Windows 10 (leading to class-action suits). Too many people are stating as fact that Microsoft is not the same company they were 5 years ago. They are right... I think they are worse.
  - whatever1 8y ago
    And yet the good GitHub sold your private repos to the highest (and according to you the most evil) bidder.
    - 8y ago
major505 8y ago
Lets be honest.... people just like to shit on microsoft. i was against open source most a decade ago. Now they understand that they need open source alternatives to keep alive. Azure has suport to various popular open source techs, they keep a lot of repositories in github, and even open sourced .net. And, you complain about microsoft buying Github? Imagine if Oracle had done the same.
u801e 8y ago
I wonder why gerrit wasn't listed?
BerislavLopac 8y ago
I wonder why does Kallithea not get much more love, it is a very decent project: https://kallithea-scm.org https://kallithea-scm.org
pehmyth 8y ago
OT BUT: That stupid github repo "imma outta here" should win the darwin award. That lady @vassudanagunta should get a tit-job ffs (pun intended)
vaceletm 8y ago
In the big wave of alternatives, we also should mention Tuleap [1] that is now open to all opensource projects. Can also be self-hosted of course ! [1] https://blog.tuleap.org/github-alternative-tuleap-open-source-agile-tool https://blog.tuleap.org/github-alternative-tuleap-open-sourc...
johnx123-up 8y ago
Probably a better comparison page https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/
marky_nolan 8y ago
Codegiant.io is also a great alternative to Github with unlimited private repositories for free. It also includes issue tracker, continuous integration and documentation. Overall great tool.

251 points by ChankeyPathak 8y ago

For all the complaints about Microsoft, I've yet to hear what they could do that would be so bad? Change the homepage to actually be useful? Improve the search? Give away free private repos?

alkonaut 8y ago
Kill Atom was the most reasonable fear I heard. And I can’t see how that wouldn’t be a well founded fear. If I was Microsoft I wouldn’t want to keep paying devs to make two so similar products (atom, code). They are much more similar than e.g code/vs or github/vsts. But even so: I agree the fear that the product will be worse in a few feels completely irrational. What I can agree with is that it’s unfortunate that it’s no longer seen as a neutral ground for development. It felt almost like a standard or like a piece of infrastructure, rather than a for-profit. But that was of course never the case. But now it becomes obvious, which might fracture the community (it was very nice to have everything in one place - e.g package managers literally started drawing stuff from github links). The appearance of neutrality and trust was the #1 feature of GitHub. Everything else is polish. Microsoft will have to work hard to keep the #1 feature working.
- brightball 8y ago
  Kill Electron would be the bigger fear. I know a lot of people don’t like it, but it has enabled so many more applications for Linux that killing it would be a major blow.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    But... vs code is based on electron too.
  - sfraise 8y ago
    We're actually working on 2 Electron apps for a very very large corporate client right now so how they handle Electron is definitely a concern for us.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Microsoft uses Electron for VS Code, SQL Operations Studio, Azure Storage Explorer, Teams Desktop, Skype, and many other tools, and it has major traction with Slack, the Github Desktop App, Discord, and many other big companies. It's not going anywhere.
  - Kipters 8y ago
    They have a bunch of Electron-based products (VS Code, Teams), it's unlikely they'd kill Electron
  - vxNsr 8y ago
    And by far the most unfounded fear. As others have said MS has tons of their own apps using electron, to kill it would be to shoot themselves in both arms.
  - ytpete 8y ago
    They could be pretty interested in shifting it away from Chromium an V8-based Node to something that uses platform webviews (Edge on Windows) and a platform-specific JS engine backing Node (ChakraCore on Windows). I believe they have posted open-source experimental forks in that direction in the past. That's very different from killing it, but it could make developing or supporting Electron apps more difficult - plus the fear that it could then start sliding down the slope of the Windows version getting more investment, eventually leading to the classic "it's best on Windows" embrace/extend platform lockin. I'm not betting on that being their play, but I could see how people would worry...
    - manigandham 8y ago
      The whole point of Electron is equal cross-platform abilities from a single code-base. Making it run "best on windows" is the complete opposite goal and rather silly considering they already have several native UI and app frameworks made for Windows.
- manigandham 8y ago
  But what does neutrality even mean? It's the git protocol, what is there to make non-neutral?
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    Not influenced by any of the major software giants. That’s about it. Github is very little about git and mostly about the hub. The inertia is in the issue tracker, forks/stars/...
- HelloNurse 8y ago
  I see simply a generic fear of Microsoft, with their history of destructive acquisitions and unpleasant marketing strategies, doing something bad to GitHub users: something only they could do (involving LinkedIn, Windows, Visual Studio, etc.) and/or something that the far more harmless original GitHub wouldn't have considered. From this point of view, speculation about what Microsoft could do is redundant; whatever they do, including nothing at all, will be considered suspect unless obviously harmful.
avenius 8y ago
My fears, in no particular order: - Worsen the usability of the site, introduce dark patterns - Steal users' code (it has been rumored to happen before) - Introduce mandatory usage of Microsoft accounts - Gain a competitive advantage by spying on competitors' private repos - Sell information about the users to the highest bidder

wolco 8y ago

I'm surprised by the lack of choices that are free non-self hosted

ChankeyPathak 8y ago
gitlab is on fire https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgId=1 https://monitor.gitlab.net/dashboard/db/github-importer?orgI...
- DougBTX 8y ago
  From the imported projects graph, looks like there was a spike, then it settled back to normal.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    Normal only because the scale of the graph is totally skewed right now. Looking at actual values, it looks like they're currently at ~2400 projects imported per measuring increment, up from <100 per increment before the Microsoft rumours first popped up, and down from 24k in the big spike.
geodel 8y ago
Why non-self hosted is supposed to be free for non open source projects?
- wolco 8y ago
  It doesn't have to be but I'm a little shocked no one is taking that end of the business.
hawski 8y ago
https://notabug.org/ https://notabug.org/ is a hosted gogs fork.
itomato 8y ago
Genuinely curious what features of a GitLab or GitHub equivalent you would require in a self-hosted scenario that 'git' doesn't provide?

vasilakisfil 8y ago

There is also Gitea: https://gitea.io https://gitea.io

rapfaria 8y ago
Before reading I was sure gitea would be mentioned right after gitlab.
agumonkey 8y ago
was suggested on #emacs
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Is Gitea only self-hosted? Does anyone offer hosted Gitea?
zzzeek 8y ago
Thanks! gogs looked great until I was horrified it has no oauth plugin support?! gitea does. why the fork? seems awkward.
- simcop2387 8y ago
  The fork happened years ago because Gogs was (not entirely sure of current status) managed by a single person who would disappear on the regular, leaving fixes and other things not merged for weeks. So it got forked by people who were contributing to Gogs, and I think that ended up pushing Gogs into more active development. Now the two projects are still very similar but diverged enough to have some important differences like the OAuth support in gitea and such.
  - zzzeek 8y ago
    oauth is a total no-brainer feature add. Years ago I abandoned Trac because I couldn't deal w/ the spam user accounts and oauth integration w/ github wasn't really a thing back then. gogs should really add this though already gitea seems like that's where this particular community has gone.

ninjamayo 8y ago

Gitlab it is then! Not sure what to do with all my Github tshirts now :)

kotajacob 8y ago
Burn them, then update all your projects on GitHub to have nothing but a readme with a link to the video :p
- ninjamayo 8y ago
  Damn, that is a brilliant idea. Spread the word :)
rixrax 8y ago
I was going to point out that GitHub pages are so great for hosting static content that that alone keeps me in GitHub. But looks like GitLab already implements their equivalent. Too bad it looks like they don't handle enabling TLS/SSL for custom domains as conveniently as GitHub does (e.g. one click to enable and they will then get the cert through LetsEncrypt or something without me having to bother with getting it from a CA, renewals etc.) [1]. Already commented about this elsewhere, but if anyone from GitLab is reading, this thing would make any potential transition much more convenient for me. [1] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_started_part_three.html#ssl-tls-certificates https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/pages/getting_starte...
- nkantar 8y ago
  For what it's worth, I started using Netlify (https://www.netlify.com/ https://www.netlify.com/) for my static sites a while ago, and it's been great. Automatic LE support is definitely one of my favorite features.
kowdermeister 8y ago
Give them away to homeless people, you'd love the irony, or simply send them to me (L/XL).

rkeene2 8y ago

There's also ChiselApp which is Free, and able to be Self-Hosted (Flint is the upstream repository -- ChiselApp is a styled Flint, without the rights to redistribute the theme).

aneutron 8y ago

Why are people jumping ship to lower quality services ? And I'm talking about unrecognizable brand names, because at least migrating to Gitlab or Bitbucket may be understandable in a way, but still an exageration in my opinion.

craftyguy 8y ago
Because now github is owned by a company that was formerly very hostile to open source software, and this company is magically not.
- natmaster 8y ago
  Steve Ballmer is no longer CEO. Companies are run by people - they are not people.
  - craftyguy 8y ago
    And what makes you think 1) company culture is no longer a thing and 2) that microsoft won't swing back towards being openly hostile or worse, 'secretly hostile' towards open source software when someone else is at the healm? I hope time will prove me wrong, but this acquisition is literally the 'embrace' phase of E3. Next comes the 'extend'.
    - naspinski 8y ago
      Microsoft has shown themselves to be very pro-open-source in the last 5+ years. Just look at things like VS Code. Microsoft is just the Nickelback of software, its cool to hate on them for no real reason (any more).
    - kingosticks 8y ago
      Why would they acquire github just to turn on it and run it into the ground? You can do that if your users are locked-in or maybe you have a competing service but neither are the case here; there are numerous alternatives and it's pretty easy to switch, as we are already seeing. If they have anything but good intentions this would be just a giant waste of time/money.

MK_Dev 8y ago

"A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source." The quote is from 2001 as is Ballmer's quote. Closing the article due to its lack of objectivity.

oneplane 8y ago
Fixing an imago set by a guy calling open-source and Linux 'a cancer' is really hard. The last few years of changes doesn't magically wipe away that bitter taste, and the last 10-20 years doesn't magically make you forget the past.
- untog 8y ago
  It's an interesting debate though. If the CEO and most of the major execs of a company have left, is it really worthwhile to factor statements made 17 years ago into your decision making process? Don't get me wrong, many will avoid MS-anything to punish them for their past conduct, which is a fair personal decision. But if you're trying to evaluate what MS will do in the future, I'm not sure how relevant 2001 is.
  - macinjosh 8y ago
    In my mind it is less about the people who made the statements or were there when the statements were made and more about whether the company has the same business model now that it did at the time.
  - pmichaud 8y ago
    I basically agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate: > Maybe the relevant factor isn't whether the same people are in place, but rather that the process that selected those people at all, selected both the "linux is cancer" people, as well as the current people. And that process is the same as it was before, optimizing for the same things, and therefore it may try to undermine open source again, once the prevailing cultural winds shift again, regardless of which warm body is currently in the hot seat. It's a little more of a abstract argument, but I don't think it's insane to consider. So the debate then becomes about whether the process really is the same or not.

jjrh 8y ago

git init --bare

keithnz 8y ago

"A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source." Then quotes stuff from 18 years ago.... ok

agumonkey 8y ago
Some people still don't trust MS, even after the recent changes. Can't blame them
kazinator 8y ago
Microsoft still owes tons of people money for the "Microsoft tax": having to purchase Windows for hardware that only ever ran GNU/Linux.

chapati23 8y ago

Honest question: Besides more traction among the open source community, where do you feel GitHub is stronger than GitLab? I’m not affiliated with GitLab, however a little biased because we’re using GitLab instead of GitHub at our company. Feature-wise, It seems to me that GitLab is running circles around GitHub. Curious about other opinions.

PascLeRasc 8y ago
That's it, the open-source community is there. Performance doesn't really matter when there's tons of amazing projects being hosted in one place. If features were important, Gitlab would be more popular than Github.
- drb91 8y ago
  Ehh, I think the community would move to a better site if there were distinguishing features. From a source-viewing and code-review perspective, they’re all more or less the same: basic.
oneplane 8y ago
The only reason some of my clients (of my own company) and some of the clients of my employer (so.. someone else's company) choose GitHub over GitLab is track record. GitLab isn't old enough with a long/stable enough track record to be considered on par. Feature- and functionality-wise, GitLab always wins. A small, but second reason some of my clients and workgroups choose GitHub is pure because of the brand name, but I suppose that could be thrown in together with track record or age.
eknkc 8y ago
I like GitHub's UI better. I'm not even sure what is the latest iteration of GitLab UI. They change it in every release and it's a mess. I still can't find stuff. Also, GitLab is slow. I'm sure that gitlab.com service would not way handle a fraction of GitHub's traffic without a complete rewrite or something like that. I like GitLab as we have a CE installation that we depend on and I want it to be successful (which it already is I think). However personally it feels worse than GitHub on casual use.

CGamesPlay 8y ago

I've never used Github for personal, closed-source projects, but if you have and want to switch to something that provides absolutely no features except git hosting, here are 3 I've used: - Keybase git: https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone (my preferred solution these days). - AWS CodeCommit: https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/ https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/ ("encrypted", but I don't know if AWS employees can access it). - Dropbox git remote: https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox (it's slow and unencrypted, but uses Dropbox).

manigandham 8y ago
All the major clouds offer repos, Google Cloud has free private ones with decent limits: https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/ https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

minxomat 8y ago

There's also (Fedora) Pagure, available hosted at https://pagure.io/ https://pagure.io/, and it can be self-hosted. Though it's not quite as painless as gitea/gogs. Example of a more active project: https://pagure.io/mlocate https://pagure.io/mlocate

AdmiralAsshat 8y ago
Didn't know about that one, thanks! This further increases my appreciation of Fedora. Between this and the COPR hosting, you can really do some serious development for Fedora without paying a dime for hosting or distribution. That's awesome.

jordigh 8y ago

Also Kallithea. https://kallithea-scm.org/ https://kallithea-scm.org/ I guess it's a wiki so I could add it myself, but apparently you need a github account to edit this wiki?

hbcondo714 8y ago

Assembla's version control has been working well for me since 2011 https://www.assembla.com/ https://www.assembla.com/

nreece 8y ago
+1 for Assembla. Reliable service, and free private repos too.

jwilk 8y ago

Launchpad is not only for Bazaar. It supports Git, too: https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git https://help.launchpad.net/Code/Git

marcinkuzminski 8y ago

The list doesn't mention it, but i'd also put https://rhodecode.com/features https://rhodecode.com/features into there.

drev 8y ago

Microsoft has cancer* * source microsoft

ThatPlayer 8y ago

There's also BitBucket's Paid Self-Hosted option, for 10 users, and a one-time payment of 10$. It even has a docker image. https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=self-hosted https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=self-hosted https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/ https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/

reificator 8y ago
For those looking into this option, it is important to note that Bitbucket's self-hosted option is a separate codebase that started with no link to the cloud product. Previously it was called Stash but was later rebranded to Bitbucket to reduce confusion.
- nickserv 8y ago
  Was not aware of this, thanks for the info. Do you know if their enterprise edition is based on cloud or server?
  - reificator 8y ago
    If you mean the Data-Centre edition, it's based on Stash. Otherwise I'm not sure I've heard of that. Here's the FAQ from when the change was made: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-rebrand-faq-779298912.html https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-r...

bpierre 8y ago

git-ssb, open source and decentralized: https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bGvXQApSXqOBwc%3D.sha256 https://git.scuttlebot.io/%25RPKzL382v2fAia5HuDNHD5kkFdlP7bG...

sebringj 8y ago

This is equivalent to a knee-jerk reaction clearly following the MS purchase of Github. The Microsoft of today is vastly different. Example: I'm using VSCode on my Mac right now and it clearly is a better alternative to something like Atom and its open source. My best friend is the head of the bash initiative at MS as well and I pretty much hated MS before. Now its pretty cool so doesn't seem like a rational view anymore to be MS negative.

sergiotapia 8y ago

Here's a good comparison page of the three big ones. https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket Gitlab seems to be picking up the pace and gaining mindshare among developers. Freelancers I'm curious, would you switch and lose your repos' stars, PRs, fork counts? Those are actually a good marketing tool for potential customers since they see you are legitimate.

valeg 8y ago

I want also add https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent Cool concept.

manaskarekar 8y ago

Raspberry Pi running your own git server. https://blog.meinside.pe.kr/Gogs-on-Raspberry-Pi/ https://blog.meinside.pe.kr/Gogs-on-Raspberry-Pi/ https://hackernoon.com/create-your-own-git-server-using-raspberry-pi-and-gitlab-f64475901a66 https://hackernoon.com/create-your-own-git-server-using-rasp... https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-git-server/ https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-git-server/

napsterbr 8y ago

Thumbs up to Phabricator, a software imo very underrated. Absolutely recommend if you are not very fond of Gitlab (furthermore, Phabricator's performance has been really good in my experience)

xellisx 8y ago
I am definately going to look at this. Now if there were a self host cloud storage (nextcloud) that also did soure repository...

alkonaut 8y ago

I’m only half joking when I say VSTS is a pretty strong contender in the code+issues space, especially if you need more complex features for CI/CD. For obvious reasons it’s not a good option if you are switching from Github out of fear of Microsoft (which is presumably the reason it’s not listed in the article).

outside1234 8y ago
Free private repos too.
ggg9990 8y ago
The site is so fucking slow though.

dismantlethesun 8y ago

> A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source. Both quotes are from 2001. So rather than a "couple of years ago", it was seventeen years ago. Toddlers walking the earth at that time, are now college graduates and developers working at Microsoft. Let's not think its the exact same group of people who said both statements, even if the company name is unchanged.

therein 8y ago
> Toddlers walking the earth at that time, are now college graduates and developers working at Microsoft This is extremely true and people need to understand how important this point exactly is. I think we all agree that Microsoft will continue to exist even 50-60 years from now with the same exact name. They will have generations of programmers passed through their corporate structure with varying goals and opinions. Tu quoque stops making sense at such timescales.

stockkid 8y ago

I like the content but the website's scroll is somehow delayed and I'm unable to pinch zoom on my mobile device.

oaiey 8y ago

These are no alternatives. GitHub is a specialized social network with git hosting included.

bauerd 8y ago
Exactly this, feature comparisons completely miss the point imo. GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens. A CI/CD pipeline bolted on top or k8s integration do not replace the community that GitHub is home to.
- pehmyth 8y ago
  "GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens." Simply false statement.
manigandham 8y ago
But there's no real stickiness there. Developers are not mainstream users who want a dumb UX like Facebook, they're perfectly capable of creating an account (if they don't already have one) and interacting with a project wherever it is. Most discussions are limited in scope to a project anyway so it's not like you need the whole site. What difference does it make to go visit issues on GitLab vs Github?
- oaiey 8y ago
  There is stickiness. Low entry burden for contributer is the key point why huge projects use GitHub instead of other platforms. And me registering at dozen of platforms, reading the legal stuff, learning the platform,... And when I finally successful submit a one line patch (how: no idea) the maintainer has a fair 50% chance of dropping it. That is not what I will do. And I will not be alone :).
  - manigandham 8y ago
    What? You can do the exact same thing in GitLab or Bitbucket in the same exact few clicks. Fork, edit, submit PR, done. Have you used these other platforms?

duxup 8y ago

I'll leave GitHub when I have some issues that I can't resolve. By then everyone will have blazed the trail for me, maybe a coupe times. ;) Much like the United States.... all my stuff is there...

macinjosh 8y ago

I am a happy gitlab.com user. However, with all of this week's news I decided to see what it would take to run my own GitLab instance. I was surprised to find that on Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user. Any cheaper/smaller instances were to anemic to run GitLab at all. Seems like there are some performance issues to deal with there.

maineldc 8y ago
I run a small gitlab instance on a $14/mo OVH instance and have been quite happy. I used to run on the smaller version and it was still OK.
- half-kh-hacker 8y ago
  For a small instance, I get away with running an instance of Gitea on a 2.49€/mo VPS.
cobbzilla 8y ago
GitLab is a Rails app, what did you expect? /s We use gitea (written in Go), it runs well on more modest hardware.
- artursapek 8y ago
  Why the sarcasm? Rails is a pig.
  - ezrast 8y ago
    Probably because GitHub is also built on Rails.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    I wonder if there's a chance GitLab will be rewritten in a more efficient language.

mastrsushi 8y ago

Is everyone really leaving GitHub, or is this just like 2013 when everyone "left" Google for DuckDuckGo. This is pretty bad personally, I'm writing a webcrawler for the site. I plan on making it cross-website anyway, but it kinda sucks hearing this.

skinnymuch 8y ago
It does not appear to be the case that a ton of people are leaving GitHub. Gitlab is mentioned far and away more than all other alternatives combined and their GitHub importing I think is like ~100K repos imported since the Sunday rumors. A lot but nothing compared to the tens of millions of repos GitHub has overall.

parvenu74 8y ago

An alternative way of solving this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17242015 Pair that an open spec for something like Jira or a Kanban board and the concept of GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket+Jira could be commodity. Fossil isn't a bad idea as a general replacement for all of this too.

bmsleight_ 8y ago

I looked at lot of these alternatives, not many are eating their own dog food. Does not inspire me with confidence. * https://gitea.io/en-US/ https://gitea.io/en-US/ The code for gitea is on Github. https://github.com/go-gitea/ https://github.com/go-gitea/ * http://gitprep.yukikimoto.com/ http://gitprep.yukikimoto.com/ The code for gitprep is on Github https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/gitprep https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/gitprep * https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ Guess what ..... https://github.com/gogs/gogs https://github.com/gogs/gogs

hjek 8y ago
I guess Gogs have an excuse, as they had to host the project somewhere, and perhaps they haven't started dog fooding because of migration difficulties, e.g. the issue tracker. But I wonder what's the excuse for Gitea as they're a pretty recent Gogs fork? They're both pretty amazing though: Self-contained binaries and less than 5 minutes setup time, so totally suitable for ad-hoc deployment.
- dmach 8y ago
  He's keeping it real, going with Apache Allura.
- reificator 8y ago
  Github also does not cost time and money to use for open source projects. I've used a few GoGS servers, but none of them were public. Hosting a public competitor to Github is a different set of skills to developing a self-hosted VCS server.
- hjek 8y ago
  Here's an explanation: https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe
exrook 8y ago
I'd guess that this is more due to the popularity of GitHub among potential contributiors to these projects. I've seen it mentioned many times here on HN that a potential contributor may not want to put in the effort to create an account on another VCS provider or send a patch to a mailing list, whereas submitting a pull request on GitHub is a much less involved process for them, given that they likely already have an account and are familiar with the process. However you could definitely argue that given that the projects in question are alternatives to GitHub, a developer interested in contributing will likely be invested enough to sign up for the alternative service.

funwie 8y ago

If it is an alternative then it is probably not the best option. You and I use Github not because we don’t know the alternatives, but because Github is better

cosmojg 8y ago
That isn't true. As with most online services, people use Github over alternatives because of the network effect. It's where everyone goes because it's where everyone is.

wilcox 8y ago

Redmine is also missing from the list. https://www.redmine.org/ https://www.redmine.org/

pjmlp 8y ago

So much drama, I am really looking forward to what will happen if Microsoft ever gets hold of one of the major Linux distributions.

zorkw4rg 8y ago

the deep integration go has with github in particular seems more ridiculous then ever.

exabrial 8y ago

I never imagined in my lifetime Apple would become Microsoft and Microsoft would become Apple. Yet here we are.

whatever1 8y ago

Enough with this. Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella? Github was not a non-profit company. But you were willing to upload your private repo there. And somehow now it is problematic.

itomato 8y ago
>Enough with this. As if, Dad.
shakna 8y ago
> Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella? Microsoft has a history of being horrible and worse to the open source community. Now, they may be trying to change that, but GitHub didn't have that history. Microsoft have baggage, and well-deserved baggage, when it comes to the open source world. Can I trust that they won't go back to their old tricks in five years? I don't know. But that's how long I need to use an ecosystem to justify hitching my horse to it, right now. (As a management decision).
O1111OOO 8y ago
> And somehow now it is problematic. As far as I know, Github hasn't delivered a surveillance, keylogging Operating System. They haven't used deceptive practices in getting users to upgrade to Windows 10 (leading to class-action suits). Too many people are stating as fact that Microsoft is not the same company they were 5 years ago. They are right... I think they are worse.
- whatever1 8y ago
  And yet the good GitHub sold your private repos to the highest (and according to you the most evil) bidder.
  - 8y ago

major505 8y ago

Lets be honest.... people just like to shit on microsoft. i was against open source most a decade ago. Now they understand that they need open source alternatives to keep alive. Azure has suport to various popular open source techs, they keep a lot of repositories in github, and even open sourced .net. And, you complain about microsoft buying Github? Imagine if Oracle had done the same.

u801e 8y ago

I wonder why gerrit wasn't listed?

BerislavLopac 8y ago

I wonder why does Kallithea not get much more love, it is a very decent project: https://kallithea-scm.org https://kallithea-scm.org

pehmyth 8y ago

OT BUT: That stupid github repo "imma outta here" should win the darwin award. That lady @vassudanagunta should get a tit-job ffs (pun intended)

vaceletm 8y ago

In the big wave of alternatives, we also should mention Tuleap [1] that is now open to all opensource projects. Can also be self-hosted of course ! [1] https://blog.tuleap.org/github-alternative-tuleap-open-source-agile-tool https://blog.tuleap.org/github-alternative-tuleap-open-sourc...

johnx123-up 8y ago

Probably a better comparison page https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/ https://docs.gitea.io/en-us/comparison/

marky_nolan 8y ago

Codegiant.io is also a great alternative to Github with unlimited private repositories for free. It also includes issue tracker, continuous integration and documentation. Overall great tool.