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Comment by arnieswap | Hacker News Reader

It's really good to see GitHub embracing the work that GitLab has been doing for a while (more than 5 years) now. While its healthy competition, it also shows how Open Source companies/projects like GitLab are ahead of proprietary companies and in fact lead the industry with their innovation.

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Gitlab isn't entirely open source. Many of their features require a commercial license. For instance, in order to use the NPM package registry, you must be on a plan (managed or self-hosted) at the $19/user level or above.

Have you seen all the features they offer for free, as well as their self-hosted version? Wayy more than GitHub.

They do offer a lot of features for free, absolutely. Still doesn't change the fact that the features we are discussing aren't on that list.

I'd just like to note here that the only part of this in GitLab that is open source is the container registry. The NPM and Maven registries are proprietary.

How GitLab is not proprietary? It is a private commercial company.

How GitLab is open source? It open sources a non-essential portion of its software, and so does GitHub.

Gitlab is like the most open source company out there. It sets examples in transparency that even Mozilla should learn from.

Calling what it open sources "non-essential" is so ridiculously misinformed that I'm really wondering what your goal is here.

I agree they open more than the non-essential parts. It's worth noting that what we are currently talking about isn't an open source innovation however. It's a proprietary offering by a company that does a lot of open source: in both cases. Github opened Atom, contributes significantly to Rails, etc.

Have you seen GitLab CE? You can deploy it in Docker or on Kubernetes using their official Helm charts. It has a ton of features compared to GitHub.

True.

But EE, the product they are making money from, is not free, and not open source. Thus GitLab is not "Open Source company", as stated by arnieswap at the beginning of this thread.

Yes they are. Most of everything they do as a company is public and done on GitLab, including their docs, meetings and more. They are like 100x more open source than GitHub and I've seen GitHub trying to advertise as the company of open source.

> They are like 100x more open source than GitHub

I don't think this is a fair (or accurate) quantification.

While Gitlab's principal product probably has more open sourced code, Github makes tremendous contributions to open source. Atom is open source. They contribute significantly to projects like Rails (for example, the multiple database feature was extracted from their codebase). This doesn't even begin to address the dependency upon Github the entire open source ecosystem has. How many millions of dollars do they spend in infrastructure every month just to keep projects like RubyGems and npm viable?

I think Gitlab is a spectacular offering, and having a single source for your entire dev-ops story is extremely compelling. However, spinning a narrative that Gitlab is more open source than Github is extremely disingenuous.

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