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Comment by elashri | Hacker News Reader

I really hope that whoever buys them not to shut it down / change model. At CERN we rely on Gitlab enterprise and I have many CI files that would take weeks to re-write into GitHub actions (there are thousands for CERN overall). We are still suffering from RedHat decision to cut CentOS after relying on it and Fermilab/CERN shutting down Scientific Linux based on the assumption that CentOS is suitable.

It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time. Although there are many examples on how proprietary hurt us too (I see you there oracle).

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> It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time. Although there are many examples on how proprietary hurt us too (I see you there oracle).

Surely FOSS is overwhelmingly preferable precisely for this reason - if you use github and they decide to screw you over you're stuck. If gitlab does decide to screw you over then you still have the source code for the last good version, and 1. you can patch/fork it yourselves, 2. you can hire someone else to patch/fork it, and 3. if there's a decent-size community then probably someone else will fork it. Or more concretely, yeah the CentOS thing sucked, but there are multiple replacement forks, which never would have been an option if it wasn't open source.

> It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time.

I think it's still the less risky option. Open Source at least usually makes migrating elsewhere easier. CentoOS -> AlmaLinux for example (or any of the other commercially supported CentOS replacements). Customers currently being exploited by Broadcom/VMware wish they had such options.

In case you are not aware, there is tooling to help with GitLab to GitHub actions migration, but I have not tested on anything complex so YMMV

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/migrating-to-github-actio...

> It also makes the CERN's strategic decision to go full Open Source less appealing by time.

This did not age well... crowdstrike.

What is CERN using instead of CentOS or Scientific Linux now?

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