GitHub lock-in?
agateau.com
agateau.com
In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.
Give me a strong reason to switch by doing something cool gitlab. Please have at-least one killer original feature that shows that you are capable of original thinking . Merely existing and throwing some free stuff at me is not a good reason for me to switch.
it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.
I personally want to live in competition. I support that through allowing my appetites to lead me when making arbitrary choices rather than ceremonious dedication.
as a consumer, I want to feel important. I havent switched but gitlab is making me feel that way. Github makes me feel like I have no choice and Im stupid not to. What seems like the better relationship?
However not everyone in tech feels this way. I detect this sentiment in the parent. See: Peter Thiel's thoughts on competition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLWyP83iU5M http://www.bnjs.co/notes/cs183b-lecture-5-peter-thiel-busine...
"The thing that’s always a big mistake is going after a giant market on day one because that’s typically evidence that you somehow haven’t defined the categories correctly. It normally means that there is going to be too much competition in one way or another."
That is nature
Edit: you do because you are apart of it. But your beliefs can influence but do not define nature
Or, more specifically - there should only be one company in the world manufacturing nuts and bolts, because you can't really create a superior nut. The first company to invent them should've won out.
* self locking nuts
* different steel alloys
* different price points
* different certifications
Thinking that others jobs are simple is a mistake that I'm waning myself off: thinking that what others do is easy, - that they should just do this and that.
(Hydrogen embrittlement)
For personal/private, I'm perfectly OK with whatever open source solutions are available.
I think it would be a good thing if GitLab or another project could compete with GitHub, but I think we're another year/product from really getting there.
... GitHub was "SourceForge, but with git".
I mean, I love the product too but let's not oversell things. Free source code hosting and development tools with an enterprise upsell were an established market for a decade before GitHub showed up. They did it better, but I think "trailblazing" is a bit much.
The idea of first mover advantage is not that we all get together to recognize the first mover and give it our business because we are so impressed by it's first moving ;)
It isn't even the free part that matters, it is that you can create a new project or add a friend without having to mentally think about how many projects/collaborators you have left.
I've been quite impressed how Github has acted over the last weeks - when there's actually an outcry they're quite nimble and can react quickly. They've noticed the competition catching up and shot themselves ahead of the curve again.
I can't pinpoint it, but I'm much more likely to browse, review, and offer pull requests in a github instance. It's intuitive and I'm used to it.
My point is that if you are making a buisiness decision and only thinking of the invoices, you aren't counting your costs well.
I can't think of any situation involving multiple paid employees where $25 is anything but a rounding error.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?scope=all&sor...
Thanks for all your feedback and creating issues!
Regarding documentation, how about referencing 'gitlab.com' on the following top level selection? [2] You could add a new box linking to the EE documentation. That was the first place where I was looking and made me stumble.
1. Can you reproduce the web hook push event failure in any way?
2. Thanks for the suggestion, I made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/doc-gitlab-com/issues/55
[1]: https://help.github.com/articles/about-github-mirrors/
[2]: e.g. https://github.com/dsandler?tab=contributions&from=2015-10-2...
In the PHP community we "fixed" that by being very restrictive with access to the GitHub repo and provide an extra tool (https://qa.php.net/pulls/#repo=php-src) where any contributor can comment/close PRs via a special GitHub account and GitHub API
If they made their pages community oriented, and allowed for people to link their github accounts to their Gitlab accounts, then they would have a shot at stealing the hearts and minds.
If they could support forking from github that would be even better, but I bet GitHub would try to block them.
We can still do better on speed and will continue to make it faster.
Where did you look on our website and expected to find information about hosting repositories on our servers? Maybe we can add a notice there.
Gitlab often comes up in these discussions. Ok, it comes up every time. Several times in the past I've went and checked it out and it seems interesting except...I couldn't find any actual projects from the main gitlab.com page, aside from the gitlab CE repo itself. So thanks for posting that link!
I have to wonder why it's not more prominent. And where's the search to find repos? I regularly find useful repos on github by searching for them. Discoverability is important to me.
Quite a good point. I think, as techies, many of us focus more on the work itself, and not so much on explaining it or making it more discoverable, understood, and on showing its benefits (at least from the point of view of end-users). (As they say about product marketing - explain the benefits, not the features - though I guess that is not to be taken literally, of course the features should be explained too.). I know I need to do more work in this area myself, and am working on it.
I'm not sure if we will keep it, that will also depend on how many people click on it.
On https://gitlab.com/explore there is a search field, for an example search please see https://gitlab.com/explore?utf8=%E2%9C%93&filter_projects=f-...
I had clicked through to a fair number of pages, but not finding any repos I wasn't prepared to sign up, so I missed the repos ;-)
> I made it visible in the top menu of our static website
Quite visible now. I'd guess that if it had been there before I would have clicked on it. Time will tell if it makes a difference. Best wishes.
Do their terms of service permit them to do that? Unfortunately, yes: "GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice. ... GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. In the event that GitHub takes action to suspend or terminate an account, we will make a reasonable effort to provide the affected account owner with a copy of their account contents upon request, unless the account was suspended or terminated due to unlawful conduct."
That's a problem. A management change at Github could have a big effect on open source software. This isn't a theoretical issue; Google Code was shut down, and Sourceforge turned to the dark side and started bundling adware with downloads.
It would be useful if a nonprofit such as the Internet Archive or the Wikimedia Foundation mirrored Github periodically. Just in case Github management got uppity.
This is what we did at GitLab, you can import multiple projects with repos, wikis, issues and pull requests in one go.
I like Github, but I've had Gitlab repos for a few years because they allow me to keep some projects "off the books" without having to pay. So, thank you again for this.
I've also used your CI, which is great. I've recommended it to a few clients, so thank you again!
You guys have done a great job for the community and I wish you all the best!
Thank you!
GitHub is a social network: star, fork, comment, popularity. The fact that some devs would see github as the only place to be to get to make their contributions "public" it is acting more as a social network and less about a git hosting tool. That's the real lock-in.
That's also GitHub's value. It is the largest social network of developers.
In the longer term this may be a deciding factor, but if enough people that right now pay for github move to gitlab the balance will shift to the point where gitlab won't be able to deal with the amount of free users and gitlab will fail because they no longer have enough paying users...
It's hard to compete with free, but it is also hard to sustain free.
Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at you for a day. Big deal.
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their pockets for the next 20-years.
https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv...
Work's blessed me with an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I get some extra bells and whistles. Discounting the extras, it's a hosted version of TFS for free (for five developers + unlimited "stakeholders"). Which is great if you have bug bears about GitHub's issue tracking.
https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs
It's not going to replace GitHub for me, yet. I think Microsoft said it themselves when they started hosting projects on GitHub instead of Codeplex: "GitHub is where the community is."
EDIT: I should say, VSO/VSTS is really focused towards .NET development. It has some special Java support, too, and beyond that it's general purpose enough to work with other languages.
One place where people screw up in git hosting is the issues or navigation. I can't wait to try this out. The community features of github are unimportant for a private repo.
The GitLab people are always posting here, so it seems the stuff you can read here about it is rather biased.
Our lead dev posted some explanations on how we're different than other popular choices: https://secure.phabricator.com/phame/post/view/766/write_rev...
David Cramer also publish some thoughts on the pull request model: http://cramer.io/2014/05/03/on-pull-requests
1. https://secure.phabricator.com/book/phabricator/article/tone...
If that were true, they would not have embarked upon a Thought Police crusade like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118 "Github threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'"
Possibly that is what people like about GitHub: Leave an audit trail of your activities, do a lot of doc fixes to have better statistics...
Perhaps the following quote of pg also applies to GitHub:
"Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."
Github is fantastic.I love using it over anyone else.
GitLab and Bitbucket are good too. You can even host stuff yourself.
Its nice to have choice. Choose the one your like.I Choose github and that is my choice.
If you dont agree comment. HN users can be so passive agressive sometimes
Quality of readers of HN and reddit getting lower all the time.
Look forward to being downvoted for ageeing with you :-)
Personally, I have several dozens software projects: Some of them are on Github, some on Bitbucket, some run on a custom Gitlab instance and some are plain git repositories on some Linux server. I think we have more choices for hosting code projects today than we had ever before, it's just that like in many other markets there is a power law at work which makes that one player has 90 % market share, this doesn't automatically mean that the largest player has a monopoly on source code hosting though.
As the author says, the fact that the software Github provides is affordable, convenient and works very well is probably the only lock-in there is, and this kind of quality-based lock-in is actually desirable in my opinion. What would not be acceptable to me is a lock-in based on the fact that your data is stored somewhere from where it's very hard/impossible to get out (SAP comes to mind), this isn't the case for Github though.