Was Github ruled out because it's not free enough in spirit or are the Gnome folks just wanting to run things on-prem?
As discussed on the article, GitLab also wasn't an option for them before the change from a CLA to a DCO. The CLA meant that although gitlab was licensed under a free software license, GitLab Inc. had permission to relicense future versions of GitLab as proprietary software, without needing to obtain permission from the original contributors. This meant that GitLab used to not be sufficiently free "in spirit" for Debian and GNOME. (While this might seem a bit paranoid, Debian and GNOME want to avoid the worst case scenario of GitLab being acquired by a company that isn't as friendly to software freedom.)
All in all, I think GitLab is doing a great job at working together with free software projects like Debian and GNOME and I am sure all the involved parties will greatly benefit from this collaboration.
You don't use github just for git.
You use it for issue tracking, pull requests and code review, CI hooks, wiki, github pages, kanban boards, bot integration, and so on.
That's all stuff that locks you in to Github, and is non-trivial to migrate to another provider.
Well, some people do. I don't, apparently you don't, probably most people don't. But you could and some people do. I've seen a few projects on github with notes to the effect of "don't bother submitting issues/PRs here, do it through our [mailing list/etc]"
git makes it even possible to host a repo on multiple git* hostings, but apparently nobody came up with a successful distributed pullreq/issue tracker yet.
The idea that it’s GitHub locking you in rather than you locking yourself in to GitHub is the argument I take issue with. But no quarrel at all with Gnome choosing GitLab, because GitLab is genuinely great.
Make sure you also tell your users not to use GitHub's comments, issue tracking, pull requests, release system, favorites/watches, or authentication.
So you're suggesting that the new home for the GNOME project's code be GitHub, without the GitHub.
Please try to be more careful with how you approach reading comments.
I don't mean to say that gnome should use github, I think that it is overall better if there is no single dominating company for open source. Just that organizing so that github is git hosting only is not that hard.
Meanwhile, they want to use the bug tracker and other features too.
There are a number of sources, all of them biased, so I'd prefer not to link any.
In my case, if KiCAD were hosted on github, I would have already contributed by now.
I think its a shame that more of these projects don't adopt a strategy of "let's try github, and if they screw us over, then we'll migrate to a platform with more freedom".
1.) Compared to Phabricator (which I used for almost last 4 years), github is really behind for code review (I didn't use gitlab, so can't compare). There is lot of missing features: I can't comment on selection of lines, see diff of subset of commits, do stacked pull request (one PR depends on another PR), view of open pull request is chaotic
Effect is that it's way harder to send small PR for review, unless you work on lot of unrelated things and multiplex.
2.) Github dominance is causing everybody using git, and stiffs competition in source control tools. For example, I find mercurial much better than git: it has similar set of features, but it's easier to use, my day-to-day chores I do with single command, and I am much less likely to screw up my repo.
I suppose it's useful never to underestimate the role of culture and tradition when it comes to these things. For the Gnome project, it's probably very important not to rely on a closed-source system, and their developers have a long history of using very different tools anyway.
The barrier doesn't work that way for everyone, either. I "grew" up (programming-wise) before Github. It seems way less cumbersome for me to make changes and submit a patch via email or whatever than to go through Github's fork the repo - do the changes - make a pull request - sync the repos dance.
(Edit: this is especially true for early contributions, or for late and complex contributions, where the review process is a little more, you know, long-winded. Github's review tool is quite atrocious.)
> I think its a shame that more of these projects don't adopt a strategy of "let's try github, and if they screw us over, then we'll migrate to a platform with more freedom".
That's a really risky thing to try. First, moving the entire infrastructure to Gitlab has been a pretty massive undertaking for Gnome -- and Gnome is one of those open source projects that really has resources. Most projects with Gnome's size and history can maybe afford to do that once every seven years, when there's a relatively quiet time and whatnot.
Second, you never really know how that "screw us over" thing is gonna happen. What if the way it happens is that, among other things, when they close your repos or whatever, they cut access to the API for your project? How are you going to migrate to a platform with more freedom then? Copy-paste every bug report ever?
IMHO, 10-15 years from now we'll be really happy that Gnome really understood that "there's no cloud, it's just someone else's computer" thing :-).
Any company providing a hosted service can do that, including Gitlab (the company) itself. They chose Gitlab (the product) because they are able to host their own instance (edit: and it’s open-source), that’s all.
GNOME was (and is as far as I know) part of GNU. The G stands for GNU -- GNU Network Object Model Environment. It actually had a CORBA ORB in it. Apart from the misguided idea of building a DE around CORBA (which, I admit, I thought was a fantastic idea at the time), the main reason for doing the work was that KDE was built on top of QT. KDE was GPL and everybody was completely happy with that part of it. The problem was that it was built on top of something that the FSF felt was incompatible with the GPL (I can't remember the exact issue).
GNOME uses the LGPL for its libraries and the GPL for its applications -- as per virtually every normal FSF project. One of the reasons there were more libraries in GNOME than you might ordinarily have was because it was intended to be a set of distributed components all talking together over TCP/IP. It's an enormous mistake, but as I am fond of saying, we're all young once.
Anyway, the point is that your notion that GNOME was somehow more pragmatic in terms of trying to avoid copyleft licenses is completely incorrect.
Gitlab has an open source version [2], which means that preferring Gitlab over Github prevents giving more control of the project's direction to another entity. ( Not speaking on behalf of GNOME of course, just remarking that it is a good thing that free software projects are preferring Gitlab over Github )