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Agreed about Bitbucket. I've used it for a long time and haven't found it to be substantively different from GitHub in either functionality or reliability. The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

bitbucket for private repos, github for public. No downside there :-)

Popularity is certainly important for open source stuff, and personal code samples that you put online for "resume" purposes. Hell, for that use case you might as well be posting your code on LinkedIn.

But for the use cases in which people actually pay money (i.e. private repos that you don't WANT outsiders to access), then how is lack of popular visibility a downside?

For open source I suppose, since GitHub being so popular makes it easier for people to contribute to your project. Still, though, the only obstacles in using Bitbucket for those purposes (that I know of) are that you need to sign up for a Bitbucket account and learn how to make pull requests. As far as resume code goes, I wouldn't trust an employer who thinks having code samples hosted on Bitbucket is a mark against you. There's just nothing different between GitHub and Bitbucket in that case. Or is there some other issue I'm not aware of?

> The major downside, as I see it, is that it's just not as popular.

Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?

Would React, D3, Rails, Bootstrap etc not get what they do now simply because "oh I don't have a bitbucket account, I'm not going to bother"

To me at least this kind of argument (I hear a lot of, nothing personal davesque!) is along the lines of "everybody is on MySpace"

> Has anyone really thought of this? Do people just happen on to a github project because "it is on github" or because someone linked their work and people liked it and wanted to contribute?

I happen to have a BitBucket account, so I can't speak directly to your point, but I'm less likely to file issues on a project if I have to register a new account with their bug tracker to do so. I imagine the same would apply to a project hosted on BitBucket if I had a GitHub account but not one on BitBucket.

Right, and, just to be clear, I actually wasn't trying to suggest that this downside is really justified (and I think you understand this). Mind share is important, however.

It is not about the software.

Github has become the number one place to show of your portfolio. Half of job postings these days encourage you to include a link to your GitHub profile.

Do you think a link to a Bitbucket profile would be ignored?

> It is not about the software.

For me, it emphatically is about the software.

Even for totally private repos, where popularity is not a factor, I continue to turn to Github because the UIs for both Bitbucket and GitLab continue to stand in the way of me easily getting shit done.

Anything we can improve in GitLab to make getting shit done easier?

I'm in the process of moving all my stuff to gitlab.com.

There's a lot of stuff going on in the sidebar and it took a while for me to figure out where things were. The mobile experience was also not amazing.

If you would like to take this conversation offline, I'd be happy to. I like Gitlab so far, although I'm only 5% in to my "migration" process.

The mobile views for sure needs some work, we're hiring frontend engineers https://about.gitlab.com/jobs/ and on Friday we hired a second person.

If you need any help please email support@gitlab.com and reference this comment.

But commenting online is encouraged, all of our issues are public.

In fact, GitLab 8.5, due the 22nd of this month, will heavily improve many views for mobile. This has been something we've been holding off on and we'll be slowing working more and more on it, as our UI matures.

GitLab 8.5 will have responsive views for most pages, but their functionality will be slightly limited compared to a full-browser, as we chose to hide certain elements (rather than a separate mobile view).

The mobile experience for github is not amazing either. It rearranges everything for no apparent reason and makes it harder or impossible to access what I want.

Focus on minimizing the friction to doing the most common tasks.

Ex. by far the most common thing I'm doing when going to a repo is looking up a file and doing something with it. So why isn't a file list the first thing which comes up when I open a repo?

Also, generally work on visual hierarchy more. GitHub does a great job of this and it makes the UI both efficient and pleasant. For example, you show the latest commit on a repo's homepage but it is very poorly differentiated from the content around it. This makes scanning the page much harder.

Thanks for the feedback!

> Ex. by far the most common thing I'm doing when going to a repo is looking up a file and doing something with it. So why isn't a file list the first thing which comes up when I open a repo?

You can set this as default in your profile at /profile/preferences! Note that with GitLab 8.4 we now also have the quick-files finder which you can open from any page in a project by typing `t`[0].

We're working hard on improving the UI and UX and improving visual hierarchy and especially providing context to the current view is very high on our list. I hope the many changes in the last and upcoming releases will help, but any more specific feedback is very welcome.

[0]: https://about.gitlab.com/2016/01/22/gitlab-8-4-released/

Github has a great UI, probably my favorite web app of all time. Not even sure why, I just like it.

Their culture is definitely screwed up - or they wouldn't be in the news like this. Culture starts at the top, a few people, even just one person at the very top. You have to take responsibility for that. The "we can break all the rules" thinking is naive - you'll find some of those rules are there for a reason.

If you wanna develop software without profit motive (and VC investment) that's awesome, but don't think flat org structures are going to fly in a company over 100 people. I'm all for question authority, but profit motive needs organization, which needs order and hierarchies enforce that order.

I don't find it that great. Finding your own repositories is a bit cryptic compared to bitbucket.

I hate to take impinge on your good nature, but you gave such good feedback to sytse I have to ask: what's getting in your way with Bitbucket? As a product company we're pretty focused on UX and spend a lot of time getting it right, so I'd love to hear any suggestions on how we can streamline it!

(I'm one of the founding engineers on Bitbucket Server, but more involved in Bitbucket.org these days)

this comment (not by me) is representative of my impression of atlassian:

Why has it been 7 years and nothing's been done? We're also considering moving everything to github, even if the price is higher... especially since the interface is more user friendly and there are far superior integrations available. It seems Bitbucket has been lagging in improvements :(

  -- https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/589/file-history-should-follow-copies-and#comment-25069061

streamline your honesty about bb.org. turn it off or get serious. atlassian's handling of bb.org has turned me from "no opinion" to "avoid" on all their products.

If I want to see someone's work, and they provide a URL, I'm interested in the content, not the identity of the service it's hosted on. Gee, this sounds familiar...

> GitHub's pricing model makes NO sense for established companies with lots of projects

Totally agree with this assessment. When we were with Github, we actually ended up on a custom plan, negotiated with them directly, because we had too many projects to fit within their normal pricing structure. We eventually moved to Bitbucket two or three years ago and it's far more cost-effective for us. At this point we have 500+ projects on Bitbucket, and we're a company of only 20 people.

What do you do with that many different projects? Genuinely curious.

I use bitbucket for the same reason. As an agency of <20 employees, we have 30 or more clients and many of them have 5-10 projects. Most of them are small projects that we don't touch often, but bitbucket is the only place we can afford to host with that many. We pay for a plan for our own org and we set up free orgs for most of our larger clients since there are rarely more than 4 devs who need access to the projects.

Agency work, so just repositories for all the various websites, web apps, mobile apps, etc., that we build and have built over the years.

I suspect that the "microservices" craze will soon have reach a "MongoDB moment". Where everyone has gotten burned from jumped in too quickly and blindly, and the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction.

However, right now microservices are blowing up. The new greenfield project that I'm working on right now started out a year ago as a monolith with one repo. It now has microservice components scattered across several DOZEN repos, with dev teams finding excuses to refactor into smaller and smaller granularity each month.

it's not just "microservices" crazyness, if you do devops, you will end-up with bazillion recipes repositories for each dependency, and will may not want to make all of them public.

Sometime back when I moved from svn to git. My default choice was Github. But their pricing was a hindrance. I guess, its more suited for US (or countries with value-equivalence with USD). 7 USD per user, did not make any sense to me, from India. So I went with AWS CodeCommit. And my experience has been good. Finally how bad can any service which uses Git (done by Linus Torvalds) can be?

I also did not understand the big hoopla. If you can open source your project, then its good for you (free!). But they depend on enterprise and potentially other businesses with private code. But then it really does not make as much sense - as in whats the real gain - most of the use cases are from command line doing git [clone/pull/push].

At least for [2], I'd suggest the community around Github is the reason many are reluctant to leave.

That's exactly my point in wondering about the ratio of students to established company professionals.

For every company I've ever worked at, the "community" or "network effect" of a source control vendor is meaningless. Because the repos are all private. Sure, the company might have SOME open source stuff mirrored on GitHub for publicity purposes. But the real bread-and-butter daily WORK that pays the bills takes place in private repos. In most cases, private repos that are hosted on-prem rather than in the cloud.

Sure, GitHub and its "network effect" matters for open source projects, and for resume-fodder side projects we tinker with as individuals. But all of that is free anyway. What about the scenarios where you'd have to pay GitHub a lot of money? How many vocal people on HN are actually IN that scenario?

Company I work for pays Github for enterprise.

GitHub continuously improves their application and enterprise customers get new features a release or so after its rolled out on github.com.

As a tinkerer, I tend to appreciate a feature when I have it missing during the day and rely on it at night. A self-network effect of sorts?

As mentioned in another comment, I'm trying gitlab to move my stuff there but I'd be a bit pissed if we got off Github Enterprise at work since it "just works" and "needs no fixing because it's great".

I was interested in your comparison in #1, wrt "HN community overreacted".

I've been searching through old HN stories about Eich, but can't seem to find any where the comments generally supported firing him due to supporting Prop 8 (banning gay marriage).

Is there a particular thread you had in mind? Or are you stating the overreaction was being angry that he might have been fired over that support?

I haven't bookmarked those threads but I'm certain I saw a lot of comments here saying things along the lines of "the right to free speak only protects you against the government", strongly implying that what happened to him was fair game because it wasn't the government who staged it.

I don't recall hearing that much in the context of Eich, but it certainly is a common go-to argument more recently among those who want to see people punished for having incorrect political views. It came up a lot when Strangeloop kicked out Curtis Yarvin, for example.

I said it back then and I'll say it here: There's a difference between "having a political view" (thinking that non-heterosexual marriages are icky) and taking positive action to prevent others from having equal rights (donating money to a lobbying/social engineering group)

One is a thought, the other is an action.

Punishing people for unknowable bad thoughts is an Orwellian nightmare. Punishing people for visible bad actions is how society moves forward.

So people are allowed to have unpopular opinions as long as they don't, you know, tell anyone else about them or anything? Sorry, but that's unacceptable.

So personally involved people aren't allowed to voice displeasure at those who have taken positive steps to harm them?

Did you completely ignore the differentiation between thought and action that I just laid out?

What would you propose we do - jail people who call for boycotts? Jail people who criticise corporations?

I'll spell this out very simply: the same laws and social standards that make it OK for you to criticise them, make it OK for them to criticise Mozilla.

And they also make it OK for me to criticize the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and for those people to criticize me for criticizing the people who are criticizing Mozilla, and etc. So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions, and a society where the second thing happens is a society that has real problems.

Both Eich and Mozilla characterize his leaving as voluntary. Now whether that's the case is somewhat disputed, but there's no evidence to suggest any other conclusion.

And for the second or third time this thread, having an opinion and taking an action are two different things. Please address that rather than just repeating your original post.

Society has decided that denying people basic rights is what's "unacceptable" and chooses to punish those that act in that fashion. And it's not like there's any other explanation for the donation either... the group he donated to was a single purpose lobbying campaign.

> Both Eich and Mozilla characterize his leaving as voluntary. Now whether that's the case is somewhat disputed, but there's no evidence to suggest any other conclusion.

Voluntary, in the sense that when you get mugged you can choose between your money or your life? For some reason I suspect Eich did not leave the position he had just taken because he wanted to spend more time with his family. And "voluntary" or not, somebody leaving a position in a private industry because of a mob that's intolerant of his unrelated political views is nothing to celebrate: in fact, it's a symbol of the wild polarization that is destroying this country.

> Society has decided that denying people basic rights is what's "unacceptable" and chooses to punish those that act in that fashion.

"Society" has decided this, has it? When did that happen? Last I heard, there was a lot of arguing going on about that very point.

> And it's not like there's any other explanation for the donation either... the group he donated to was a single purpose lobbying campaign.

And as I stated previously, "you can hold any opinion you want as long as you don't tell anyone about it" is unacceptable.

So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it? Criticism leads to boycotts lead to resignations. At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?

> So again I ask, what would you propose we do about it?

How about for starters, "we" stop getting people fired for holding unpopular political opinions? That said, I don't have a good idea of how to persuade everyone to change this disastrous course we're on, if that's what you were asking.

> At what point does it become unacceptable, and unacceptable to whom?

Unacceptable to people who realize that in a large nation full of people with wildly different lifestyles and cultures, a level of tolerance is required so that we can all go about our business as opposed to murdering each other in the street.

This doesn't mean that you don't speak your mind, advocate for your cause, and criticize those idiots over there who are clearly wrong; it does mean that you acknowledge those idiots still should be able to earn a living and argue for their own causes, no matter how wrong they are.

> So now that we've gotten that out of our system, we can realize that there's a difference between being criticized and losing one's job because of one's political opinions

As I see it, Eich didn't lose his job because of his political opinions, he lost (or decided to leave) his job because of his inability to perform basic duties of the job -- a CEO, after all, must ultimately be responsible for managing a company, including its public image and relations with its employees, customers, etc.

And, honestly, I think that even with the past donation, the situation was manageable, and that anyone who was up to the task of being CEO of an organization like Mozilla could have managed it.

I don't see how that's relevant in the grand scheme of things. In particular, it doesn't justify what the mob did, or make it good that we have these mobs.

"Having a political view" contra SSM might not only take the form of "non-heterosexual marriages are icky." Engaging in caricature doesn't help advance the discussion of PC in the workplace. People might believe that homosexual marriage isn't morally or ethically legit. That a company or large numbers of people disagree doesn't mean the people that have these views should be punished for thoughtcrime or for expressing their opinions, or donating to a non-PC cause.

> "the right to free speak only protects you against the government"

I strongly agree with that statement, but I also strongly object to the ouster of Eich. An opinion on one does not imply an opinion on the other.

I support the right of the KKK to march through the streets, but that doesn't mean I should have to hire one of their members.

> I support the right of the KKK to march through the streets, but that doesn't mean I should have to hire one of their members.

That's not the analogy. It's contrived, but to stick with the theme of white racists, is it ethical (legality aside) for a board full of clansmen to fire a CEO that donated to the ADL? To keep it simple, let's say the CEO is not Jewish, but does financially support the ADL.

Of course it is. Why wouldn't it be? They can fire him for any or no reason and it's completely ethical. They don't owe him employment.

> They can fire him for any or no reason and it's completely ethical.

You must have a different definition of ethics than the rest of us do. I'm having a hard time reconciling that opinion with a definition of "ethical" that actually means anything, to be honest. Would you care to provide a definition?

> That's not the analogy.

I was making an oblique reference to a rather famous free speech case. [0]

> is it ethical (legality aside) for a board full of clansmen to fire a CEO that donated to the ADL?

No, but I have a hard time finding anything clansmen do ethical. If your ideology is motivated by bigotry, that's the problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

I'm familiar to the case. My point was that I don't find it particularly analogous to the Eich case. Having no relationship to some people who walk down the street occasionally is substantially different than actually having to be professionally associated with someone and practice tolerance on a regular basis. I'd also argue that free speech should be protected in both cases (socially if not legally).

> If your ideology is motivated by bigotry, that's the problem.

I agree. I'm not sure corporate leaders need legal protection. Perhaps. But the right to publicly assemble and speak absolutely needs legal protection. That's why I was trying to draw another analogy. To explore the difference between the Eich and Skokie incidents.

> My point was that I don't find it particularly analogous to the Eich case.

I think there's been a miscommunication, because neither do I.

They're fundamentally different cases, in that I think the NSDAP should have the legal right to march but they can absolutely be punished socially.

Likewise, I think what happened to Eich was perfectly legal but not necessarily moral. They're not the same and that was my point: invoking "free speech" as a Constitutional right has no bearing on the Eich case.

I don't have a link, and I'll admit that this is subjective and anecdotal.

I just recall there being a LOT of people who found it perfectly reasonable to oust somebody for long-ago political donations, despite there being no indication that he ever actually discriminated against anyone at Mozilla.

Yeah, you can make arguments that the mere existence of a such past donation creates a symbolically hostile environment, etc. But those arguments seemed pretty thin to me. At the time Eich made that donation, every major Democratic presidential candidate (including Clinton and Obama) were ALSO publicly opposed to marriage equality. So it seemed like extreme mental gymnastics to put a "hate speech" label on Eich.

In the GitHub story today, if you were feeling charitable then you could likewise apply some positive spin too. There IS some context to those slideshow bullet-points and that tweet, which has been buried under the outrage. Once again, I disagree with these messages even when that context is considered. But my point is that it seemed like there were a lot more people willing to do mental gymnastics in the Eich case than in this one.

> At the time Eich made that donation, every major Democratic presidential candidate (including Clinton and Obama) were ALSO publicly opposed to marriage equality. So it seemed like extreme mental gymnastics to put a "hate speech" label on Eich.

No, the extreme mental gymnastics here involve thinking that hate speech can be defined by looking at the content of Clinton and Obama's campaign speeches.

The ouster came six years after his donation. The only way that could be characterized as "long ago" is by the use of extreme mental gymnastics.

Anyway, donating to Proposition 8 is equivalent to making the statement "I will actively work to take other people's rights away, even though it will never affect me". Is it any surprise that he was ousted? It was a disaster for Mozilla to associate with him.

He was on the wrong side of history, but your last sentence was unnecessary and over-the-top. He wasn't hired as a CEO, he was promoted into it. Before he became CEO, his political donations would not necessarily have been a concern.

> your last sentence was unnecessary and over-the-top.

People started boycotting Mozilla after he was promoted. "Disaster" is an appropriate descriptor.

>He was on the wrong side of history

Does the last 6 months count as history? I don't think enough time has elapsed to fully ascertain the merits of same-sex marriage. Changes in sexual culture take a few dozen years to propagate and get a good read on the real effects.