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> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives Every company I've been at that tried to self-h

> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub. Nobody in business cares if it's open source/free software. They care about managed hosting, centralized services, invoicing, etc. DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.

debarshri 11mo ago
This is the irony of software engineering. This is how a lot of bad software gets written too.
sofixa 11mo ago
> Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. 99% of companies I've seen self host their VCS, it has been Gitlab (with some rare sel-hosted GitHub Enterprise everyone seems to hate, and the very rare Bitbucket). To be fair most of them started with it when Gitlab was really really ahead, features wise. The gap has somewhat closed, but Gitlab is still a superior product IMO. Just the fact that you can have an actual organisational structure, and move it around, and share variables/configs between groupings, beats anything GitHub have to offer which is slightly nicer than GitLab.
- shykes 11mo ago
  Are you based in Europe? Gitlab has a much stronger presence there. In the US Gitlab adoption is much weaker in my experience.
  - sofixa 11mo ago
    Yep, but I interact with companies all over the world, and while American ones tend to not self-host (in general, but VCS in particular), out of those that do, Gitlab still seems more popular.
- nacozarina 11mo ago
  I’ve setup self-hosted gitlab configs for multiple projects and it works fine.
tyre 11mo ago
Yeah I can't see a better alternative to GitHub. OSS can build truly incredible libraries and frameworks. User facing products? ehhhhh not so much. GitHub has gotten worse over the years but it's not like there's some gold standard open source alternative. And remember, early GH was filled with a pretty amazing group of developers and open source advocates. If the counter is that, instead of buying github, we could have invested in building some other tool, well, that's not how this works. People need to build what the company is actually building for its users.
- oxalorg 11mo ago
  At work we've started switching to codeberg (which uses forgejo) and honestly it's a breath of fresh air compared to GitHub. It's blazing fast compared to GitHub and has feature parity with our needs.
  - FinnKuhn 11mo ago
    Not an option for the majority of companies as it only allows open source repositories as far as I'm aware.
    - akshitgaur2005 11mo ago
      Tangled.org
    - homebrewer 11mo ago
      Selfhosting gitea is trivial, I'm saying this as someone who has been doing it at work for almost 6 years. Our experience has recently prompted another org (run by people we know) to move off GitHub, they also seem to be happy.
      - FinnKuhn 11mo ago
        There are plenty of alternatives to Github, from Gitlab and Gittea to Forgejo, but Codeberg is not one of them, which is what I wanted to stress.
makeitdouble 11mo ago
> DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped. And the companies with specific needs (funnily enough, at the other end of the cash spectrum) or have a lower internal cost than the products out there. There's more of them out there than we give credit for I think. In particular, running one's own stack on the corner seldom makes the news.
whateverboat 11mo ago
LOL. You can do GitLab hosting with High Availability at a very professional level without needing a huge team.
Cthulhu_ 11mo ago
And I hope ours does too. We're on Gitlab with runners on AWS at the moment, and the overhead is huge. Thousands of working hours spent on setting up and maintaining the infrastructure (even if it's code and probably a fraction of what our own datacenter would involve), millions in costs, hundreds of jobs spinning up to do jobs. But also, many hours spent building jobs and the like that are off-the-shelf on Github Actions. This is the main issue though, it feels like doing anything but what the largest companies offer just costs more time and money. It reminds me of the decades long push to move away from Microsoft, only for e.g. the office 365 offering to show up and make everyone's (software, account management) work easier and cheaper, forever.
- darkwater 11mo ago
  Well, what else can we say? Enjoy your unilateral price increases or features shoved down the throat (CoPilot anyone?), with exactly 0 extra money in your pocket. Unless you are a C-level, of course.
LtWorf 11mo ago
> later moved to GitHub And had to live with their constant outages :)
boppo1 11mo ago
Blender does it
MarsIronPI 11mo ago
How does Forgejo compare here? Would it be better or worse than Gitlab? How about a self-hosted Sourcehut instance?
kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago
Lots of businesses can't put sensitive work product onto external servers. You just don't work for them.
port11 11mo ago
Yours is a fairly cynical take, if realistic. It's true that hosting a forge or code repo is fairly complex and doesn't move the needle for most businesses, but… As a CTO at a small company, I chose to self-host key infrastructure or picked small players to avoid tech giants. Perhaps there'll be more businesses like that, where decision makers put their money where their mouth is.

debarshri 11mo ago

This is the irony of software engineering. This is how a lot of bad software gets written too.

sofixa 11mo ago

> Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. 99% of companies I've seen self host their VCS, it has been Gitlab (with some rare sel-hosted GitHub Enterprise everyone seems to hate, and the very rare Bitbucket). To be fair most of them started with it when Gitlab was really really ahead, features wise. The gap has somewhat closed, but Gitlab is still a superior product IMO. Just the fact that you can have an actual organisational structure, and move it around, and share variables/configs between groupings, beats anything GitHub have to offer which is slightly nicer than GitLab.

shykes 11mo ago
Are you based in Europe? Gitlab has a much stronger presence there. In the US Gitlab adoption is much weaker in my experience.
- sofixa 11mo ago
  Yep, but I interact with companies all over the world, and while American ones tend to not self-host (in general, but VCS in particular), out of those that do, Gitlab still seems more popular.
nacozarina 11mo ago
I’ve setup self-hosted gitlab configs for multiple projects and it works fine.

tyre 11mo ago

Yeah I can't see a better alternative to GitHub. OSS can build truly incredible libraries and frameworks. User facing products? ehhhhh not so much. GitHub has gotten worse over the years but it's not like there's some gold standard open source alternative. And remember, early GH was filled with a pretty amazing group of developers and open source advocates. If the counter is that, instead of buying github, we could have invested in building some other tool, well, that's not how this works. People need to build what the company is actually building for its users.

oxalorg 11mo ago
At work we've started switching to codeberg (which uses forgejo) and honestly it's a breath of fresh air compared to GitHub. It's blazing fast compared to GitHub and has feature parity with our needs.
- FinnKuhn 11mo ago
  Not an option for the majority of companies as it only allows open source repositories as far as I'm aware.
  - akshitgaur2005 11mo ago
    Tangled.org
  - homebrewer 11mo ago
    Selfhosting gitea is trivial, I'm saying this as someone who has been doing it at work for almost 6 years. Our experience has recently prompted another org (run by people we know) to move off GitHub, they also seem to be happy.
    - FinnKuhn 11mo ago
      There are plenty of alternatives to Github, from Gitlab and Gittea to Forgejo, but Codeberg is not one of them, which is what I wanted to stress.

makeitdouble 11mo ago

> DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped. And the companies with specific needs (funnily enough, at the other end of the cash spectrum) or have a lower internal cost than the products out there. There's more of them out there than we give credit for I think. In particular, running one's own stack on the corner seldom makes the news.

whateverboat 11mo ago

LOL. You can do GitLab hosting with High Availability at a very professional level without needing a huge team.

Cthulhu_ 11mo ago

And I hope ours does too. We're on Gitlab with runners on AWS at the moment, and the overhead is huge. Thousands of working hours spent on setting up and maintaining the infrastructure (even if it's code and probably a fraction of what our own datacenter would involve), millions in costs, hundreds of jobs spinning up to do jobs. But also, many hours spent building jobs and the like that are off-the-shelf on Github Actions. This is the main issue though, it feels like doing anything but what the largest companies offer just costs more time and money. It reminds me of the decades long push to move away from Microsoft, only for e.g. the office 365 offering to show up and make everyone's (software, account management) work easier and cheaper, forever.

darkwater 11mo ago
Well, what else can we say? Enjoy your unilateral price increases or features shoved down the throat (CoPilot anyone?), with exactly 0 extra money in your pocket. Unless you are a C-level, of course.

LtWorf 11mo ago

> later moved to GitHub And had to live with their constant outages :)

boppo1 11mo ago

Blender does it

MarsIronPI 11mo ago

How does Forgejo compare here? Would it be better or worse than Gitlab? How about a self-hosted Sourcehut instance?

kevin_thibedeau 11mo ago

Lots of businesses can't put sensitive work product onto external servers. You just don't work for them.

port11 11mo ago

Yours is a fairly cynical take, if realistic. It's true that hosting a forge or code repo is fairly complex and doesn't move the needle for most businesses, but… As a CTO at a small company, I chose to self-host key infrastructure or picked small players to avoid tech giants. Perhaps there'll be more businesses like that, where decision makers put their money where their mouth is.