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Comment by vruiz | Hacker News Reader

I really like GitLab, we use it and they follow the business model I wish GitHub had. But as they become bigger and bigger I have to wonder how much longer until they start antagonizing GitHub with these feature clones, and who should have my support when that day comes.

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I'd say that it's a pretty easy choice. Pick the open source one.

Only Gitlab CE is OSS, GitLab EE is "publicly viewable" but neither FOSS/OSS [1].

It's really a shame because I would pay good money to have GitLab EE under a FOSS license.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/license-faq/

Out of curiousity, would you consider GPL Affero sufficiently FOSS?

> Out of curiousity, would you consider GPL Affero sufficiently FOSS?

Of course it's a free software license (although I have my doubts about the enforceability of the Affero sections in the AGPL). GitLab EE is proprietary (even though you can read the source).

As long as we're talking about the GNU AGPL then absolutely! I would say that the original AGPL is sufficiently FOSS but it's GNU GPL incompatible which might be annoying. It's not necessarily a deal breaker though if it's handled well.

> As long as we're talking about the GNU AGPL then absolutely! I would say that the original AGPL is sufficiently FOSS but it's GNU GPL incompatible which might be annoying. It's not necessarily a deal breaker though if it's handled well.

It's GPLv2 incompatible. GPLv3 has a special exception for the AGPL.

We initially had GitLab EE under the MIT expat license. But this proved to be a problem for potential customers, their purchasing department didn't understand. We also like that now we can store the EE source in a public repository that accepts merge requests.

I am usually in the Open Source camp, but I don't think the choice is so easy here. Not only does GitLab copy GitHub, it does so by relying on a lot of Open Source sofware written by GitHub and/or GitHub employees.

You may like GitHub or not, but you cannot deny they contribute a lot to Open Source. I am not entirely sure how much that has changed since his resignation, but here is Tom Preston-Werner's position on Open Source: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

>Not only does GitLab copy GitHub, it does so by relying on a lot of Open Source sofware written by GitHub and/or GitHub employees.

That seems like a bizarre complaint, considering git itself is FOSS, initially written by Linus, and that GitHub's entire business is effectively built around hosting git repositories.

GitHub contributes back a lot to git itself.

You could support both of them. Support GitHub in defending their product from blatantly being copied, and support GitLab in preserving their momentum while making changes to their product so it doesn't look and behave quite so much like GitHub.

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