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Comment by marenkay | Hacker News Reader

While this is totally an awesome move in terms of marketing...

Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?

Considering that public Git services are kind of the single source of failure for all of the projects providing what the Internet needs to run, shouldn't we instead band together and make something like the Linux Foundation for Git, providing Git infrastructure for all those projects?

It kind of feels like a really stupid move to hand over central infrastructure into the hands of any commercial entity.

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I think that is is best to open pull requests to Gitlab instead.

You may object and say that it is a bit lame to re-implement something that is already in the paid version. However, it is best than re-implementing everything from scratch.

Also, I have heard that Gitlab is open to open-sourcing features when you show interest to have it in the free version.

Take a look at this issue for example, which tracks Gnome's wishlist for Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/43566.

The guys behind the Gitlab company move the community edition pretty fast too, possibly faster than what we would achieve by duplicating efforts.

However, as I mentioned in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17241209), this may change because the new free Ultimate/Gold subscriptions could become excuses to stop open-sourcing features to Gitlab CE.

We're always open to discussing open sourcing parts of GitLab. We will continue to do so on a case by case basis.

Well, there is savannah.gnu.org. That is exactly what it is for (created as a response to everyone and their dog hosting their projects on SourceForge).

But I'll be honest. The main reason people want to use these services is the hosting, not the software. That's why you see large numbers of people moving from GitHub to GitLab. They are willing to give up the software that they are used to in order to go with a hosting provider with which they have more trust.

But if you are in a mood to write code, I'll give you my wish list: Issue tracker and review tool built into git itself. You can start here: https://github.com/google/git-appraise

Canonical's bazaar is also Foss, as is the new source forge. Both are rather complex to self-host, though.

So is gitlab in a sense, but they've managed to wrap the complexity in their installer, with some success.

You might be underestimating how hard such a thing is to create, and overestimating how well funded open source is...

Neither of these, been in both situations.

I just am kind of ashamed for us as developers that we can not manage to band together and solve the task. That is what is really troubling.

We already have the software (git) and it is distributed by design - some people (and companies) prefer a central authority with some additional features (most importantly some issue management system I guess) that is the "upstream" truth and they don't want to run this infrastructure.

So we have the software part (git, sshd, gitea, gitlab, etc.), but if you want a "central" repository you need a server, ergo server administration and people like to outsource that. I expect the hosting costs of github to be tremendous and there is currently no institution that wants to do that.

You could also demand to have some open search engine (instead of Google), but this seems really non-trivial to stem - and people's expectations got very high (for uptime, availability, etc.) - which is probably a good thing as it shows how far we have come.

"Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?"

Because Github's major thing was providing hosting and tools, along with the network of users. Hosting costs money. How would an alternative get around that? Self hosting couldn't be a requirement, because most projects don't have any kind of income, and so wouldn't be able to afford it.

> Why doesn't the Open Source community actually band up and make a Github alternative that is actually good and free for Open Source?

Wasn’t that Gitlab a few years ago? They latter turned into a company with a closed, "enterprise" version then raised money.

One of the closest attempts that I've seen lately is https://notabug.org/

It uses it's own fork of Gogs and it looks and feels like GitHub - maybe even too much.

Ok, who's paying?

See Wikipedia, Linux Foundation, etc. We all are in some way, and we all should.

Or we start treating parts of the internet which everyone uses like water, streets.

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