> "When I say trusted – I mean trusted," he went on. "We disagree with some of the previous monetization strategies from an industry and business perspective, and have immediate plans to discontinue programs inconsistent with our being a trusted and reliable resource for the entire open source community.
I wish them luck. I'm not thrilled by the GitHub monoculture.
Our Omnibus packages installs all GitLab dependencies in the /opt directory. If this is not your thing it might be good to know that there are now official native Debian packages for GitLab 8.4 (still working on Jesse backport).
For a small team like ours, with lots of small repositories, it's a no brainer.
When you're developing an open source application, though, you need the community of Github. I'm hoping that changes in the future. Not that Github goes away, just that alternatives are equally as viable to build a community around.
I've few complaints about bitbucket and when you consider it's still free for me it's insane (I've felt so bad by how much I used it I kinda wish they would charge a few bucks a month sometimes).
Unfortunately, bitbucket lacks some features: their markdown syntax does not allow HTML and they have no views / downloads statistics. The lack of statistics means that their search feature is not so good- no way to sort by popularity.
I'm trying gitlab now: it also doesn't seem to have views/downloads stats. Also the web-site was slow a few days ago.
The lack of statistics is odd: even sourceforge has this.
I don't feel too strongly about GitHub one way or the other, but having some more options can only help.
Before the malware shenanigans started, they could have tried to relaunch with a full rewrite, keeping just the brand. Now even the brand is tainted, there is nothing left except a large database of users and SSH keys (and Slashdot, which apparently is still read by some people).
http://doc.gitlab.com/ce/workflow/importing/import_projects_...
Keep in mind that even with announcements and long shutdowns, many projects would be lost without officially-sanctioned archiving; either because their author has moved on, or they might do all of their project interaction via git commands and never see warnings on the Web interface.
There is not even a measurement tool for trust on commits right now. Nothing like- (Line / NrOfDiffrentComittersTouching)* ComitersTrustworthyness according to other Projects * NrOfSimilarUnreviewedLines
Where there is no metric, there is no trust, not even in open source.
To move away from GitHub one would have to not only clone the repository (and all of the branches, tags, etc), but also scrape off the Wiki, Issues, and contact information of contributors. Then they would need to set up an alternative with a similar security infrastructure and notify everyone relevant to its existence.