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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github". Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim. Gitlab is a slow and clunky github clone at best.

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.

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Do you want to live in a centralized world or one with competition? How do you support that?

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?

I wholeheartedly agree with you. A world of centralized monopolies is quite a scary prospect. Less so when they are not enforced by government, but concerning nonetheless.

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...

Thiel's monopoly idea might encourage someone building a new repository hosting thing to focus on a particular underserved segment and get everyone in that market.

"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."

competition should happen naturally( i.e somone offering something clearly superior) not because I think there should be competition on principle.

You define nature? I believe nature is defined by action which is intepreted after the fact or predicted before. Naturally we can also see a community such as hacker news has an effect on the wider population but likely not as strong of one that it, as a group, wants. But hacker news isnt one group but rather many voices that may or may not have similar objectives

That is nature

Edit: you do because you are apart of it. But your beliefs can influence but do not define nature

Surely you're arguing for there to be a monopoly at any given time there - if company X does Y first, you'll always use company X's stuff (even after other companies implement Y) until another company does Z first, in which case you'll always use their stuff.

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.

To be honest, superior nuts is being produced:

* 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.

There are certainly inferior nuts and bolts. The New (San Francisco) Bay Bridge is loaded with 'em.

(Hydrogen embrittlement)

"Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader, gitlab can make no such claim."

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 ;)

I don't like that a company like GitHub has access to all my code and things which may include personal information (I sometimes type things in LaTeX and put it under version control). Running GitLab on my server brings my code under my control. Sounds fair? It's the same reason why some people refuse to use Google services like calendar or photos even though they offer convenience.

Agreed. I think github enterprise is worth it for companies, just like I think a Jira instance is a no-brainer.

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.

Service as a Software Substitute?

> Github was a trailblazer that deserves its position as market leader

... 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.

And social networking features, which have proven to be its gold egg imho. Like the article mentions, Github has for many become a defacto showcase for your body of work.

The killer feature is open source which allows an excellent channel for the community to get what they want one way or another. Gitlab CI is pretty awesome too, we'll see what other surprises come out in the next release.

>Gitlab is a me too product whose main selling point is "not github".

it sounds like some people are looking for just that, though.

Everybody will have different reasons. Free private repositories is a damn pretty compelling reason for me and I suspect many others.

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.

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