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Comment by dcgoss | Hacker News Reader

Very often on HN I see links describing the latest and greatest GitLab feature. It really seems like they've been working hard and doing a good job, and they seem to have a clear vision ("master plan", in their terms). Where is GitHub in all of this? Aren't they concerned about being outinnovated?

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Github is so ubiquitous that they can't afford to move fast and break things like Gitlab can - another team at work considered moving to Gitlab to use all these new features, found bugs everywhere and eventually went back to Github.

Thanks for the feedback -- it sucks that they found so many bugs in the product. Any chance you remember what specifically they ran into?

Mainly intermittent errors clicking around the interface, particularly 404s when clicking on files that existed - they're not sure whether that was a problem in the web interface or the files actually temporarily went missing.

That sounds more like a problem in the installation than a bug in GitLab. Was this self-hosted or on GitLab.com?

Perf seems to be a recurring issue, e.g. see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/675

That said, I find the openness with which core architectural issues are discussed to be refreshing. (e.g. see the very detailed writeup explaining the root cause of the above issue, here https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/677)

I'm sorry to hear that your colleagues found bugs in many places, what are the things that stood out the most?

The HN community at some point decided to collectively turn on GitHub, because of some incident where (choose your own adventure: someone at GitHub was accidentally trying to help someone who wasn't white/male/heterosexual OR they're too busy waging identity wars to actually work OR someone with the right intentions definitely went too far, actual damage was limited, but it's the type of issue that people remember forever)

I think they collective criticism has long ago become unfair. Two reasons:

– The OSS community is currently working incredibly well. It's innovative, productive, inclusive, and the quality is excellent. Github is responsible for a large chunk of this development. Go check out sourceforge to get an idea of how it used to be. Seriously – it's like David Foster Wallace's Fish/Water metaphor: we don't know how good we have it, because there's no point of reference to compare it too.

It's also quite obvious that GitLab profits from the conceptual work done at GitHub. I'm not advocating that there should be any protection for software concepts, screen layouts etc. But I like to at least acknowledge where good ideas originated, and GitHub has had quite a few (once again: it's easy to forget after getting used to it).

I also had the experience that GL was dog-slow when I tried it. That probably changed, or I really couldn't understand anybody using it.

Github has been too busy turning into a political party.

I think I recall seeing a picture of their reception area and it's a replica of the oval office. Oh here it is: http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/07/githubs-new-offi...

If that doesn't speak volumes I don't know what does.

That seems more like parody to me

The more interesting speaking volume was when they then removed it because the "concept of meritocracy is divisive"... they really did get infected with some silly ideas.

http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug/

It's funny how threatened people feel by what GH was/is trying to do, when that remains their first and only association (two?) years after a minor incident where some support person made a mistake.

I'd also question the assumption that it's possible to run a business completely "neutral". That just means remaining in the Status Quo, which is exactly what the "other side" of that debate wants. Is it unfair to promote women so as to increase the share of female CEOs (Fortune 500: 4%)? Yes, it could be. But doing nothing is not neutral.

> after a minor incident where some support person made a mistake.

I haven't heard about that, do you mind sharing the story?

I honestly don't remember the details – a customer service rep locked or deleted a repository because of a complaint about a word in it, which je completely misunderstood. Something like master/slave.

Someone else also proclaimed their support for affirmative-action hiring on twitter, in words that some of my white cis-male brothers felt were insulting. (they actually were, but until I've picked cotton for a decade or been shot by police I'm not going to consider myself victimized).

From there on, GH has been under strict observation. They're obviously on the progressive end of the spectrum so people are now finding new transgressions left and right. Community guidelines were the last. They're not different from Google or any number of SV companies, but the association seems to stick.

It's certainly not the only one. Another big one was opal gate:

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

Github hired the her after that to thought police all of github. I don't particularly care how they're run internally but I don't want to do business with a service that will ban your account for political disagreements.

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