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Comment by PurpleFoxy | Hacker News Reader

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

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> 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.

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.

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.

No, it doesn't because Gitlab.com exists. Installability is an insurance policy.

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.

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.

Check out

https://gitlab.kitware.com/users/sign_in

https://gitlab.xiph.org/users/sign_in

You can sign up with your GitHub account.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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#int...

2 - https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/12/22/gitlab-13-7-rel...

3 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/5074

4 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/1823

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.

I have the exact opposite experience, and it just works in ~90% of the cases, ~5% being behind a feature gate, 4% behind a paid tier, and 4% bugs.

It's easy to manage either via Helm or omnibus packages, and does a ton of things well enough. It still has significantly more features than GitHub.

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.

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.

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.

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/

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...

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!

Update: seems like Gitlab removed the requirement of having one application per institution from https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/join/, I just applied again.

> has the same niceness of GitHub

I gitlab significantly harder to use and more error-prone than Github

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/).

For OSS projects considering a move, check out this 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/). 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!

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)

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