9 ms·

"So in moving it to GitHub, we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day. And I grew up

"So in moving it to GitHub, we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day. And I grew up during the heydey of the Free Software Foundation, so I know this is a trap, but I’m tired and don’t have the energy to be a server admin for something that’s held together with scotch tape and prayers when I’m really supposed to be writing OpenGL code." This seems to sum up the biggest pain point that drives people away from OSS. Not knowledge, not skill, not price, but the total experience of a nice piece of software that lets you get the work you actually want to get done... done.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago
Wonder why they did not pick GitLab since it is significantly better for FOSS ideals and has the same niceness of GitHub
- fileeditview 6y ago
  My guess is the network-effect. If you want more contributions Github is the platform to pick for your project. Good or bad it is the de facto standard platform for OSS projects with a huge pool of potential developers.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    That's it. Back in the day that's what was great about source forge. Now it's github. Many people already have an account there so you significantly lower the bar for people to get involved with patches, bug reports etc. If a project has self hosted infra and wants me to sign up to their Bugzilla I think twice before doing so. And if github really turns to shit because Microsoft shows their true evil face you can just move platforms again.
    - jhasse 6y ago
      Check out https://gitlab.kitware.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.kitware.com/users/sign_in or https://gitlab.xiph.org/users/sign_in https://gitlab.xiph.org/users/sign_in You can sign up with your GitHub account.
      - iruoy 6y ago
        https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in even allows you to login with a GitLab account. Which ironically isn't possible on these other two.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    I don't think this is it. I think it's more about (1) marketing and discoverability and (2) ease for current maintainers. Getting new contributors is overrated for OSS unless they are an exceptional contributor (like if a big org were to contribute). Main incentive is getting more consumers of the project (increase popularity) and making it more convenient for current team.
    - fileeditview 6y ago
      I agree but think it's a bit of both and depends on the project. I e.g. don't think SDL needs more exposure. Everyone in game dev knows SDL.. many game engines / frameworks are built on top of it.
- 1_player 6y ago
  > has the same niceness of GitHub Debatable. As a previous paid customer, I have never been a fan of GitLab, I've always found it slow, buggy and of confusing design language. YMMV.
  - ta988 6y ago
    I think what was meant is that at least parts of GitLab are FOSS and can be installed locally which in not the case with github.
    - pitterpatter 6y ago
      But installable locally kinda defeats the whole point of this move? And as someone who manages a small gitlab instance, it's not always set it and forget it unfortunately.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        No, it doesn't because Gitlab.com exists. Installability is an insurance policy.
- john_cogs 6y ago
  GitLab team member here. For anyone considering a similar move, I encourage you to check out our GitLab for Open Source program: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
  - ta988 6y ago
    For academics, it take a few minutes to get a github academic account. For gitlab you have to write justifications and wait and wait, to maybe get it...
    - smarx007 6y ago
      Yep, our university has GH Enterprise and refuses to “procure” (as it requires the central body to agree to the ToS) free Gitlab for academia as “another” git solution. Our project team on Gitlab cannot get into that program for academics because they only let one application per institution. I understand each side but still don’t see how we can solve this problem. Would love to find a way!
      - smarx007 6y ago
        Update: seems like Gitlab removed the requirement of having one application per institution from https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/, I just applied again.
- the_jeremy 6y ago
  I use GitLab at work. My experience is that it has more features that work less well. There are a bunch of comments pointing to a GitLab issue to explain stupid hacks in our CI/CD pipelines.
- nuritzi 6y ago
  Thanks, @PurpleFoxy! I tend to agree with @Fileeditview about the network effect and how GitHub has done a great job of helping OSS projects with visibility. Like john_cogs, I'm also a GitLab team member, and am part of the Community Relations team. I run the GitLab for Open Source program. I joined about a year ago and am really impressed by how fast GitLab moves forward. We have a lot of awesome stuff coming up to make the product, and our community, even better. With a release each month, we use our momentum to make big strides in the DevSecOps space -- so people can rest assured that we'll keep improving quickly! We like to build along with our users, and believe everyone can contribute to our product roadmap, and all aspects of our company (e.g. see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/). For OSS projects considering a move, check out this GitHub vs GitLab Decision Kit: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/decision-kit/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/decis... It outlines some of the key points to consider when evaluating a move. I'm also happy to answer any questions about the GitLab for Open Source program john_cogs mentioned below (https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/). It's a great deal in that OSS projects get 50,000 CI minutes for free along with our top tier in SaaS or self-managed. Feel free to reach out to opensource@gitlab.com with any questions!
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    Best two things GitLab needs to do: 1. Fix their bugs instead of new features (ex: rebase fails 9/10 time for us) 2. Fix their pricing (ex: $99 per user is way to expensive and that is the only plan that allows free users)
- wdb 6y ago
  Github Actions is already a good reason to use Github over Gitlab. Also the pricing is much better with Github even for Github Enterprise. All kind of normal features are behind a $99/user/month fee. I don't understand why things like vulnerability scanning needs to cost $80 per user more and then at the same not supporting multiple report files as artefacts in monorepo.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  I think they implicitly addressed this: > So we’re moving to servers we don’t control, which does make me nervous, but the argument goes like this: Microsoft owns GitHub, and it’s highly unlikely Microsoft is going to go bankrupt anytime soon. If Microsoft pulls the plug on GitHub, it’s not just SDL that would be in trouble, it would be the entire open source ecosystem, so interested parties would move fast to help you migrate to somewhere else…right? Gitlab Inc. is dramatically more likely to go out of business that Microsoft, and Gitlab generally is dramatically more likely to have significant outages than Github.
- mlindner 6y ago
  Sorry but GitLab is utterly horrendous from a developer's perspective compared to GitHub. It's massive enterprise bloatware (like most Atlassian products for example) that is nigh unusable without an entire team of people to manage it. My company uses it and it causes me problems almost every other day. Things that should "just work" never do. Further when something gets reported to GitLab they automatically close old issues and things never get fixed. One outstanding huge issue is that if you mark certain files as owned by a specific team for example, it won't notify the teams to come in and actually review the code. There's options that say they do it, but it never works. (The notification system in general is an utter mess.) GitLab is an example where everything is chopped up into tiny pieces and nothing works across different parts of the codebase. I don't envy anyone that works for GitLab as just the look of the code shows what a mess the backend must be.
  - john_cogs 6y ago
    GitLab team member here. We have Code Owners [1] and recently introduced Merge Request Reviewers [2]. Our team is working on the author-review handoff [3] as part of their work to improve the overall merge request reviewer experience [4]. I'm sure they would appreciate any detailed feedback you could share on the epics linked below. 1 - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/code_owners.html#introduction https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/code_owners.html#int... 2 - https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/12/22/gitlab-13-7-released/#reviewers-for-merge-requests https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/12/22/gitlab-13-7-rel... 3 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5074 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5074 4 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1823 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1823
    - mlindner 6y ago
      Code Owners don't work. If you assign a team as the owner it doesn't do anything unless the team itself is also added to the project. Further it doesn't seem to properly notify people either. We've fallen back to emailing everyone manually whenever a pull request is submitted.
  - sofixa 6y ago
- agentdrtran 6y ago
  > has the same niceness of GitHub I gitlab significantly harder to use and more error-prone than Github
colechristensen 6y ago
>This seems to sum up the biggest pain point that drives people away from OSS. Not knowledge, not skill, not price, but the total experience of a nice piece of software that lets you get the work you actually want to get done... done. This is why I continue to be fascinated by FreeBSD, I don't use it for much but when I do, what I'm trying to do almost always works right out of the box. My point is that is all comes down to packaging, which is done everywhere. Docker is so popular because debian-style/rpm-style/etc packaging systems and the maintainers of said packages do a pretty uneven job of making things work without luck or fiddling (or having to have package specific knowledge about how to do something obvious). Docker doesn't really do a great job either, but it has a different set of problems and having the old ones gone is nice.
- oblio 6y ago
  What are you using FreeBSD for? I imagine it's quite good at some things, but isn't that range kind of limited? You need to have the precise set of hardware that's well supported and then use it for precisely the thing it supports well.
  - dazzawazza 6y ago
    In my experience of using FreeBSD for twenty or so years, for the most part, if it's a major vendor and a few years old then it's supported. It is true that FreeBSD is slower to get new hardware support but I actually like that, it's one of the major reasons why things just work in FreeBSD. You put the work in upfront, select the right hardware and FreeBSD will serve you well for years with very little effort. They aren't chasing some imaginary/political/technological dream they are delivering high quality software using tried and tested methods.
  - lmm 6y ago
    > What are you using FreeBSD for? I imagine it's quite good at some things, but isn't that range kind of limited? You need to have the precise set of hardware that's well supported and then use it for precisely the thing it supports well. No you don't? You can throw it on a random commodity desktop and expect it to work. I imagine laptops are harder if you want suspend etc. - it feels pretty similar to how Linux was a few years ago. (If anything support for old hardware tends to be better than Linux because they don't keep changing the kernel interfaces, so a barely-maintained driver from 5 years ago is probably still usable). You don't need to use it in some particular way, it's fine for a daily-driver desktop or home server. I used mine for a little bit of everything until recently - ordinary KDE desktop, fairly normal web hosting environment running some stuff I wrote in Python with WSGI, database server, home VPN server... all the usual stuff.
zokier 6y ago
Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is also why I like sourcehut, it represents to me sort of downshifting movement in the world that seems to be so very overspeeding. But I do feel that sr.ht does need certain almost monkish attitude to be satisfied with the austere facilities.
- ketzo 6y ago
  I think there's a certain "hacker cred" that comes from using really user-unfriendly software. And that's cool, but at some point OSS communities are starting to realize that "ease of use" is a hugely important quality. If they don't, they won't keep up with closed-source alternatives, end of sentence.
- hyperion2010 6y ago
  For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent level of technical excellence that is required to compete. Making the lives of developers of free software easier has rarely if ever been on the list of priorities for many of the core projects.
  - charliebrownau 6y ago
    This is what happens when you hire * Jewish Zionists * Mentally ill (trans) * Feminists (anti male brainwashed commie cunts) * Censor people and exlude White straight males that are skilled/qualied/experenced over non white people
  - AceJohnny2 6y ago
vlovich123 6y ago
I just wish they would invest in the code review aspect of their tools. It’s pretty trash compared to competitors like reviewboard or phabricator (haven’t used Jira or Gitlab recently so can’t comment on those). A big missing feature is the ability to easily upload a stacked diff. Also the whole pull request thing is confusing - why not just use the commit and automatically populate title/summary + figure out which branch I’m likely to merge in to so that there’s a 1 click button to create the review (or push to origin/pr/branch_name to create the review from git cli)
- properdine 6y ago
  at least on Github, if your branch only has one commit, it will use the commit to automatically populate title and summary. And recently pushed commits show up on top of the repo page with a one-click button to open a PR :) (or you can go to the "branches" page to do this as well)
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    It does not prepopulate in my experience (or if it does, not reliably). And I literally said I want an easy hit command line way to just push to a special branch name to have the pull created. You’re answer is the stereotypical answer of telling the user to adapt to the tools instead of improving the UX (not to mention completely ignoring my point that GitHub doesn’t support stacked diffs). GitHub has a lot of advantages and has maintained their community but they lack pretty badly in some ways on the usability of their UX flow/feature set for power users. This isn’t necessarily accidental or a wrong decision since they might be prioritizing the broader dev community that isn’t familiar with more opinionated dev workflows and they’re solving the Ux for 90% of PRs. I still think there’s a way to strike that balance better and I hope they do so so that I don’t hate my life whenever I’m forced to use GitHub.
MaxBarraclough 6y ago
Depends on the specific software. Plenty of Free and Open Source software 'just works' just about perfectly. Firefox and Notepad++ for instance. In the specific instance of GitHub, I have to agree it's nicer and better polished than the alternatives, but I'd also say the Free Software alternatives (GitLab, SourceHut, etc) are catching up, and are already usable. Hosting your own GitLab instance gives you a far nicer solution than an old school solution like SourceForge. > we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day People are paid to work on various Free and Open Source software projects, including Firefox and Notepad++, and most famously, the Linux kernel.
- sofixa 6y ago
  I wouldn't say GitHub is nicer or more polished than GitLab. Both have similar feature set ( GitHub did well to catch up after years of stagnating, with Actions, docker/package repositories, etc) even if GitLab still has an advantage there, good ecosystems ( GitHub has more tools integrating with it than GitLab), and both work and are fully polished.
- Deukhoofd 6y ago
  I've been running Gitea myself, and honestly I've found it more polished than Github in general. Never really causes me issues either.

PurpleFoxy 6y ago

Wonder why they did not pick GitLab since it is significantly better for FOSS ideals and has the same niceness of GitHub

fileeditview 6y ago
My guess is the network-effect. If you want more contributions Github is the platform to pick for your project. Good or bad it is the de facto standard platform for OSS projects with a huge pool of potential developers.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  That's it. Back in the day that's what was great about source forge. Now it's github. Many people already have an account there so you significantly lower the bar for people to get involved with patches, bug reports etc. If a project has self hosted infra and wants me to sign up to their Bugzilla I think twice before doing so. And if github really turns to shit because Microsoft shows their true evil face you can just move platforms again.
  - jhasse 6y ago
    Check out https://gitlab.kitware.com/users/sign_in https://gitlab.kitware.com/users/sign_in or https://gitlab.xiph.org/users/sign_in https://gitlab.xiph.org/users/sign_in You can sign up with your GitHub account.
    - iruoy 6y ago
      https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in https://gitlab.gnome.org/users/sign_in even allows you to login with a GitLab account. Which ironically isn't possible on these other two.
- devmunchies 6y ago
  I don't think this is it. I think it's more about (1) marketing and discoverability and (2) ease for current maintainers. Getting new contributors is overrated for OSS unless they are an exceptional contributor (like if a big org were to contribute). Main incentive is getting more consumers of the project (increase popularity) and making it more convenient for current team.
  - fileeditview 6y ago
    I agree but think it's a bit of both and depends on the project. I e.g. don't think SDL needs more exposure. Everyone in game dev knows SDL.. many game engines / frameworks are built on top of it.
1_player 6y ago
> has the same niceness of GitHub Debatable. As a previous paid customer, I have never been a fan of GitLab, I've always found it slow, buggy and of confusing design language. YMMV.
- ta988 6y ago
  I think what was meant is that at least parts of GitLab are FOSS and can be installed locally which in not the case with github.
  - pitterpatter 6y ago
    But installable locally kinda defeats the whole point of this move? And as someone who manages a small gitlab instance, it's not always set it and forget it unfortunately.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      No, it doesn't because Gitlab.com exists. Installability is an insurance policy.
john_cogs 6y ago
GitLab team member here. For anyone considering a similar move, I encourage you to check out our GitLab for Open Source program: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
- ta988 6y ago
  For academics, it take a few minutes to get a github academic account. For gitlab you have to write justifications and wait and wait, to maybe get it...
  - smarx007 6y ago
    Yep, our university has GH Enterprise and refuses to “procure” (as it requires the central body to agree to the ToS) free Gitlab for academia as “another” git solution. Our project team on Gitlab cannot get into that program for academics because they only let one application per institution. I understand each side but still don’t see how we can solve this problem. Would love to find a way!
    - smarx007 6y ago
      Update: seems like Gitlab removed the requirement of having one application per institution from https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/, I just applied again.
the_jeremy 6y ago
I use GitLab at work. My experience is that it has more features that work less well. There are a bunch of comments pointing to a GitLab issue to explain stupid hacks in our CI/CD pipelines.
nuritzi 6y ago
Thanks, @PurpleFoxy! I tend to agree with @Fileeditview about the network effect and how GitHub has done a great job of helping OSS projects with visibility. Like john_cogs, I'm also a GitLab team member, and am part of the Community Relations team. I run the GitLab for Open Source program. I joined about a year ago and am really impressed by how fast GitLab moves forward. We have a lot of awesome stuff coming up to make the product, and our community, even better. With a release each month, we use our momentum to make big strides in the DevSecOps space -- so people can rest assured that we'll keep improving quickly! We like to build along with our users, and believe everyone can contribute to our product roadmap, and all aspects of our company (e.g. see https://about.gitlab.com/direction/ https://about.gitlab.com/direction/). For OSS projects considering a move, check out this GitHub vs GitLab Decision Kit: https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/decision-kit/ https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab/decis... It outlines some of the key points to consider when evaluating a move. I'm also happy to answer any questions about the GitLab for Open Source program john_cogs mentioned below (https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/). It's a great deal in that OSS projects get 50,000 CI minutes for free along with our top tier in SaaS or self-managed. Feel free to reach out to opensource@gitlab.com with any questions!
- apple4ever 6y ago
  Best two things GitLab needs to do: 1. Fix their bugs instead of new features (ex: rebase fails 9/10 time for us) 2. Fix their pricing (ex: $99 per user is way to expensive and that is the only plan that allows free users)
wdb 6y ago
Github Actions is already a good reason to use Github over Gitlab. Also the pricing is much better with Github even for Github Enterprise. All kind of normal features are behind a $99/user/month fee. I don't understand why things like vulnerability scanning needs to cost $80 per user more and then at the same not supporting multiple report files as artefacts in monorepo.
ojnabieoot 6y ago
I think they implicitly addressed this: > So we’re moving to servers we don’t control, which does make me nervous, but the argument goes like this: Microsoft owns GitHub, and it’s highly unlikely Microsoft is going to go bankrupt anytime soon. If Microsoft pulls the plug on GitHub, it’s not just SDL that would be in trouble, it would be the entire open source ecosystem, so interested parties would move fast to help you migrate to somewhere else…right? Gitlab Inc. is dramatically more likely to go out of business that Microsoft, and Gitlab generally is dramatically more likely to have significant outages than Github.
mlindner 6y ago
Sorry but GitLab is utterly horrendous from a developer's perspective compared to GitHub. It's massive enterprise bloatware (like most Atlassian products for example) that is nigh unusable without an entire team of people to manage it. My company uses it and it causes me problems almost every other day. Things that should "just work" never do. Further when something gets reported to GitLab they automatically close old issues and things never get fixed. One outstanding huge issue is that if you mark certain files as owned by a specific team for example, it won't notify the teams to come in and actually review the code. There's options that say they do it, but it never works. (The notification system in general is an utter mess.) GitLab is an example where everything is chopped up into tiny pieces and nothing works across different parts of the codebase. I don't envy anyone that works for GitLab as just the look of the code shows what a mess the backend must be.
- john_cogs 6y ago
  GitLab team member here. We have Code Owners [1] and recently introduced Merge Request Reviewers [2]. Our team is working on the author-review handoff [3] as part of their work to improve the overall merge request reviewer experience [4]. I'm sure they would appreciate any detailed feedback you could share on the epics linked below. 1 - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/code_owners.html#introduction https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/code_owners.html#int... 2 - https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/12/22/gitlab-13-7-released/#reviewers-for-merge-requests https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/12/22/gitlab-13-7-rel... 3 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5074 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5074 4 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1823 https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1823
  - mlindner 6y ago
    Code Owners don't work. If you assign a team as the owner it doesn't do anything unless the team itself is also added to the project. Further it doesn't seem to properly notify people either. We've fallen back to emailing everyone manually whenever a pull request is submitted.
- sofixa 6y ago
agentdrtran 6y ago
> has the same niceness of GitHub I gitlab significantly harder to use and more error-prone than Github

colechristensen 6y ago

>This seems to sum up the biggest pain point that drives people away from OSS. Not knowledge, not skill, not price, but the total experience of a nice piece of software that lets you get the work you actually want to get done... done. This is why I continue to be fascinated by FreeBSD, I don't use it for much but when I do, what I'm trying to do almost always works right out of the box. My point is that is all comes down to packaging, which is done everywhere. Docker is so popular because debian-style/rpm-style/etc packaging systems and the maintainers of said packages do a pretty uneven job of making things work without luck or fiddling (or having to have package specific knowledge about how to do something obvious). Docker doesn't really do a great job either, but it has a different set of problems and having the old ones gone is nice.

oblio 6y ago
What are you using FreeBSD for? I imagine it's quite good at some things, but isn't that range kind of limited? You need to have the precise set of hardware that's well supported and then use it for precisely the thing it supports well.
- dazzawazza 6y ago
  In my experience of using FreeBSD for twenty or so years, for the most part, if it's a major vendor and a few years old then it's supported. It is true that FreeBSD is slower to get new hardware support but I actually like that, it's one of the major reasons why things just work in FreeBSD. You put the work in upfront, select the right hardware and FreeBSD will serve you well for years with very little effort. They aren't chasing some imaginary/political/technological dream they are delivering high quality software using tried and tested methods.
- lmm 6y ago
  > What are you using FreeBSD for? I imagine it's quite good at some things, but isn't that range kind of limited? You need to have the precise set of hardware that's well supported and then use it for precisely the thing it supports well. No you don't? You can throw it on a random commodity desktop and expect it to work. I imagine laptops are harder if you want suspend etc. - it feels pretty similar to how Linux was a few years ago. (If anything support for old hardware tends to be better than Linux because they don't keep changing the kernel interfaces, so a barely-maintained driver from 5 years ago is probably still usable). You don't need to use it in some particular way, it's fine for a daily-driver desktop or home server. I used mine for a little bit of everything until recently - ordinary KDE desktop, fairly normal web hosting environment running some stuff I wrote in Python with WSGI, database server, home VPN server... all the usual stuff.

zokier 6y ago

Personally I find this far more worrisome signal of the health of foss ecosystem than the quibbles between elastic and amazon. To me the idea of software "by hackers for hackers" and scratching your own itch has always been one of the key attractions in FOSS ecosystem, but somehow now our itches seem to have outgrown our ability to scratch then. Doing almost anything yourself feels impractical these days. This is also why I like sourcehut, it represents to me sort of downshifting movement in the world that seems to be so very overspeeding. But I do feel that sr.ht does need certain almost monkish attitude to be satisfied with the austere facilities.

ketzo 6y ago
I think there's a certain "hacker cred" that comes from using really user-unfriendly software. And that's cool, but at some point OSS communities are starting to realize that "ease of use" is a hugely important quality. If they don't, they won't keep up with closed-source alternatives, end of sentence.
hyperion2010 6y ago
For better or for worse, this is nothing new. It is a symptom of the fact that the FSF and other FOSS organizations have displayed a fantastic failure of technical leadership for over 3 decades. The political leadership has not been bad, but if you go back and dig through the history of open source you will see that there have been multiple repeated failures by the supposed thought leaders to provide the equivalent level of technical excellence that is required to compete. Making the lives of developers of free software easier has rarely if ever been on the list of priorities for many of the core projects.
- charliebrownau 6y ago
  This is what happens when you hire * Jewish Zionists * Mentally ill (trans) * Feminists (anti male brainwashed commie cunts) * Censor people and exlude White straight males that are skilled/qualied/experenced over non white people
- AceJohnny2 6y ago

vlovich123 6y ago

I just wish they would invest in the code review aspect of their tools. It’s pretty trash compared to competitors like reviewboard or phabricator (haven’t used Jira or Gitlab recently so can’t comment on those). A big missing feature is the ability to easily upload a stacked diff. Also the whole pull request thing is confusing - why not just use the commit and automatically populate title/summary + figure out which branch I’m likely to merge in to so that there’s a 1 click button to create the review (or push to origin/pr/branch_name to create the review from git cli)

properdine 6y ago
at least on Github, if your branch only has one commit, it will use the commit to automatically populate title and summary. And recently pushed commits show up on top of the repo page with a one-click button to open a PR :) (or you can go to the "branches" page to do this as well)
- vlovich123 6y ago
  It does not prepopulate in my experience (or if it does, not reliably). And I literally said I want an easy hit command line way to just push to a special branch name to have the pull created. You’re answer is the stereotypical answer of telling the user to adapt to the tools instead of improving the UX (not to mention completely ignoring my point that GitHub doesn’t support stacked diffs). GitHub has a lot of advantages and has maintained their community but they lack pretty badly in some ways on the usability of their UX flow/feature set for power users. This isn’t necessarily accidental or a wrong decision since they might be prioritizing the broader dev community that isn’t familiar with more opinionated dev workflows and they’re solving the Ux for 90% of PRs. I still think there’s a way to strike that balance better and I hope they do so so that I don’t hate my life whenever I’m forced to use GitHub.

MaxBarraclough 6y ago

Depends on the specific software. Plenty of Free and Open Source software 'just works' just about perfectly. Firefox and Notepad++ for instance. In the specific instance of GitHub, I have to agree it's nicer and better polished than the alternatives, but I'd also say the Free Software alternatives (GitLab, SourceHut, etc) are catching up, and are already usable. Hosting your own GitLab instance gives you a far nicer solution than an old school solution like SourceForge. > we’re finding that a lot of things are just nicer because a large paid staff of engineers is working on it every day People are paid to work on various Free and Open Source software projects, including Firefox and Notepad++, and most famously, the Linux kernel.

sofixa 6y ago
I wouldn't say GitHub is nicer or more polished than GitLab. Both have similar feature set ( GitHub did well to catch up after years of stagnating, with Actions, docker/package repositories, etc) even if GitLab still has an advantage there, good ecosystems ( GitHub has more tools integrating with it than GitLab), and both work and are fully polished.
Deukhoofd 6y ago
I've been running Gitea myself, and honestly I've found it more polished than Github in general. Never really causes me issues either.