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Comment by _pmf_ | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to compete against GitHub. I hope they will get some traction so we have an alternative to GitHub once it gets bought by MS (and becomes the next SourceForge).

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Is bitbucket considered not a competitor? I've found it quite suitable for anything github does, though I'm at max a 5 person team.

Bitbucket is awesome. I'm using it for all non-essential repos that I have as a side/small clients projects. I'm paying for 5 private repos on GitHub and whenever I see that I don't use a repo that often I just move it to bitbucket ( I'm such a bastard customer - I know ).

Two examples, why I don't use BitBucket for big projects and essential clients :

1. Interface is not that good - e.g. makes it hard to manipulate issues. 2. Integrations with some CI is not as good as in GitHub.

BitBucket is far superior to GitHub. It's not even a question.

Sometimes I end up on Bitbucket pages for a repo, and have a hard time locating how I can view the directory tree of the repo. I wouldn't call this "superior." It's not unfixable, but definitely not superior.

Precisely the one reason I can't bother to use it for real: I'd like the source tree to be the default view.

Settings -> Repository details -> Landing page -> Source

On an unrelated note, I gave up on GitLab last year because the landing page always showed recent commits instead of the readme, making it less welcoming to new users who just want to see what the project is about.

I'm glad to see they have changed this; navigating to a GitLab project now shows you the readme. Definitely going to give it a long hard look to see if I can switch again.

Awesome, hope you like what you find.

Sure, but that should be the default setting, even if it can be changed.

> Sure, but that should be the default setting, even if it can be changed.

That's a strong statement... I prefer bitbucket default view actually. The fact I can see the latest commits right at the start is very useful to me.

It really depends on the mindsets of users. My guess is that Github users tend to browse/read code in multiple repos more while Bitbucket users tend to work on their own private repos more. So it's logical that Github defaults to source tree while Bitbucket defaults to commit history.

What? :)

I like the integration with Hipchat and the business model too. For small groups is a great place to start your work privately until is clean enough to make it public.

Github has a lot of social features, but as a git hosting service, Bitbucket is as good as Github. And Bitbucket has free private repos.

Why would Microsoft buy github? They have their own.

Why did Google buy YouTube when they have Google Video?

YouTube was <1 year old when it was bought; GitHub is 7 years old.

Nitpick: YouTube was 1.5 years old (founded in February 2005, deal finalized in November 2006)[0].

I just looked that up because I really thought YouTube had been around longer before Google acquired it. That's interesting to learn, so thanks for pointing that out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube

For the same reason they're using GitHub to host all of their new open source initiatives.

Can't beat em', eat em'.

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