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GitHub Alternatives

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251 pointsChankeyPathak188 comments

I looked at lot of these alternatives, not many are eating their own dog food. Does not inspire me with confidence.

* https://gitea.io/en-US/ The code for gitea is on Github. https://github.com/go-gitea/ * http://gitprep.yukikimoto.com/ The code for gitprep is on Github https://github.com/yuki-kimoto/gitprep * https://gogs.io/ Guess what ..... https://github.com/gogs/gogs

I guess Gogs have an excuse, as they had to host the project somewhere, and perhaps they haven't started dog fooding because of migration difficulties, e.g. the issue tracker.

But I wonder what's the excuse for Gitea as they're a pretty recent Gogs fork?

They're both pretty amazing though: Self-contained binaries and less than 5 minutes setup time, so totally suitable for ad-hoc deployment.

He's keeping it real, going with Apache Allura.

Github also does not cost time and money to use for open source projects.

I've used a few GoGS servers, but none of them were public. Hosting a public competitor to Github is a different set of skills to developing a self-hosted VCS server.

Here's an explanation: https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe

I'd guess that this is more due to the popularity of GitHub among potential contributiors to these projects. I've seen it mentioned many times here on HN that a potential contributor may not want to put in the effort to create an account on another VCS provider or send a patch to a mailing list, whereas submitting a pull request on GitHub is a much less involved process for them, given that they likely already have an account and are familiar with the process.

However you could definitely argue that given that the projects in question are alternatives to GitHub, a developer interested in contributing will likely be invested enough to sign up for the alternative service.

"I'd guess that this is more due to the popularity of GitHub among potential contributiors to these projects."

Doesn't that support bmsleight's point? If Github is more popular than NotGithub, even among the developers of NotGithub, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in NotGithub.

No, it is about making a compromise because you live in the real world.

Oh, it definitely could be considered as evidence that Github is a better platform for code hosting than gitea, gogs, etc. However I think that the difference is popularity is far more likely to be caused by network effects around Github as well as Github's comparative age.

There are also other factors impacting a users's decision to choose one hosting platform/software over another unrelated to the functionality of the software, such as code licensing and self hosting capability.

In summary, popularity certainly can be an indicator of whether or not a software or service is worth using, but it's not a direct measure of the quality or robustness or whatever other factors you may care about when making a decision.

This isn't a social network. There's more to a source code hosting platform than popularity.

For me it's the ability to self host on cheap hardware. For that Gogs gets my support.

Please look at: https://kallitgea-scm.org http://fossil-scm.org Both eat their own dog food.

Since I hadn't heard of it and had to Google: https://kallithea-scm.org/ (typo in the link above)

https://code.rhodecode.com also, hosting RhodeCode sources.

Kallithea is a fork of RhodeCode too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RhodeCode#Move_to_open_source

https://notabug.org/ does eat its own Gogs fork^W^W dog food [0].

[0] https://notabug.org/hp/gogs/

The implication that these services are an "alternative" to GitHub is only coming from the blog post, none of them try to directly compete with GitHub as a platform and service. Instead they provide software mostly for self-hosting a GitHub-like service.

There's no point in running the service on your own, instead you need to go where the people/developers are and where you can be easily discovered.

It could be argued that this is smart. Imagine you merge something that, as a simple example, renders pull inaccessible. Your authoritative source for the fix would then be itself inaccessible. People running that code would be in the dark as to what is wrong, or may struggle to report problems (if issues become inaccessible). Manual steps would be involved because their CI/CD might also break.

You'd expect them to never run the latest code in prod to avoid exactly this, but a cherry-picked vulnerability fix is one example of how this could realistically happen.

Well, there is a clear rationale behind that. This was brought up in another HN comment thread [1]:

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

https://lobste.rs/s/gokjbo/gitea_1_1_0_released#c_dg9pwe

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17245323

"A couple of years ago Microsoft was anti-open-source." The quote is from 2001 as is Ballmer's quote. Closing the article due to its lack of objectivity.

Fixing an imago set by a guy calling open-source and Linux 'a cancer' is really hard. The last few years of changes doesn't magically wipe away that bitter taste, and the last 10-20 years doesn't magically make you forget the past.

It's an interesting debate though. If the CEO and most of the major execs of a company have left, is it really worthwhile to factor statements made 17 years ago into your decision making process?

Don't get me wrong, many will avoid MS-anything to punish them for their past conduct, which is a fair personal decision. But if you're trying to evaluate what MS will do in the future, I'm not sure how relevant 2001 is.

In my mind it is less about the people who made the statements or were there when the statements were made and more about whether the company has the same business model now that it did at the time.

I basically agree with you, but just to play devil's advocate:

> Maybe the relevant factor isn't whether the same people are in place, but rather that the process that selected those people at all, selected both the "linux is cancer" people, as well as the current people. And that process is the same as it was before, optimizing for the same things, and therefore it may try to undermine open source again, once the prevailing cultural winds shift again, regardless of which warm body is currently in the hot seat.

It's a little more of a abstract argument, but I don't think it's insane to consider.

So the debate then becomes about whether the process really is the same or not.

It isn't only a shortsighted selection process, but also cultural imprinting: the replacements of gone managers tend to be selected to be similar to them and fit in the same place, and this includes sharing similar opinions.

Indeed it is. Same goes for other prominent figures, like Steve Jobs. People were/are convinced that the whole identity, all products and every choice was Jobs-bound and therefore without Jobs, what Apple does can't be just as good as it was when he was alive and running things.

So past CEOs can make a lasting impact, and in many ways it works out badly because the negative comments get the most attention.

Where Apple, according to some louder fans is not as good as it was under Jobs, for Microsoft under Nadella the inverse is true: according to the haters, just because it looks better now doesn't mean the (to them) bad years are gone.

Generalising, no matter what direction a transition takes (good to bad or bad to good), it's always the loud messages pointing out the bad past or bad future that gets the most attention and influences choices the most.

It's almost like trust between people: doing things right 99% of the time but doing one thing wrong once always makes that 99% of 'good' disappear and only the bad is taken as the 'true' value. In the extreme: lie once, and you are a liar. Even if you are 99 years old and have never lied before. That one time, once, will be what defines you as 'bad', and the rest does not outweigh it. Of course in reality that extreme example is not super likely, but nevertheless, it should carry the point I'm attempting to make ;-)

It's not the sum, aggregate or balance that seems to count, only how 'bad' your 'badness' is.

Is it or is it just the embrace stage of embrace, extend, extinguish?

It would be vital to know what made MS change their stance against Open Source in general and Linux in particular; if it was "we can't beat them directly, so let's destroy them by faking an alliance, possibly gaining also control from the inside" (hint: Linux Foundation platinum membership) then we still have every reason to remain skeptic.

At least some of that rhetoric was directed at the GPL specifically. And in that sense, many people in the open source world feel similarly and avoid copyleft.

Do you honestly know anyone in the "open source world" who avoids GNU and Linux?

Avoids GPL libraries when developing, yes. Avoid Linux, no.

I've interacted online with some BSD zealots that were so invested in not using Linux they pretend not to know what systemd is and things like that, in order to signal to the rest of the irc channel how plugged in they are to the BSD community.

Edit: down voted for answering the question asked? Good grief.

A positive aspect of the article is that includes the full cite and not the shortened version.

There were more recent examples of foul behavior that was hostile towards FOSS. Like siding with Oracle on copyrightability of APIs[1]. Damage from this is still present today, until courts will declare APIs non copyrightable.

1. https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MSFT-...

It's all good now, though. Nothing to worry about.

> This is not all about Microsoft. This is about the independence of what has become the de-facto home of open source. It shouldn't be owned by any company that has any agenda other than host that home.

> So no, we won't relax:

https://twitter.com/UpEnd_org/status/1003467392712880128

I've never used Github for personal, closed-source projects, but if you have and want to switch to something that provides absolutely no features except git hosting, here are 3 I've used:

- Keybase git: https://keybase.io/blog/encrypted-git-for-everyone (my preferred solution these days).

- AWS CodeCommit: https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/ ("encrypted", but I don't know if AWS employees can access it).

- Dropbox git remote: https://github.com/anishathalye/git-remote-dropbox (it's slow and unencrypted, but uses Dropbox).

All the major clouds offer repos, Google Cloud has free private ones with decent limits: https://cloud.google.com/source-repositories/

Here's a good comparison page of the three big ones.

https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket

Gitlab seems to be picking up the pace and gaining mindshare among developers.

Freelancers I'm curious, would you switch and lose your repos' stars, PRs, fork counts? Those are actually a good marketing tool for potential customers since they see you are legitimate.

There is also Gitea: https://gitea.io

Before reading I was sure gitea would be mentioned right after gitlab.

was suggested on #emacs

Is Gitea only self-hosted? Does anyone offer hosted Gitea?

Thanks! gogs looked great until I was horrified it has no oauth plugin support?! gitea does. why the fork? seems awkward.

The fork happened years ago because Gogs was (not entirely sure of current status) managed by a single person who would disappear on the regular, leaving fixes and other things not merged for weeks. So it got forked by people who were contributing to Gogs, and I think that ended up pushing Gogs into more active development. Now the two projects are still very similar but diverged enough to have some important differences like the OAuth support in gitea and such.

oauth is a total no-brainer feature add. Years ago I abandoned Trac because I couldn't deal w/ the spam user accounts and oauth integration w/ github wasn't really a thing back then. gogs should really add this though already gitea seems like that's where this particular community has gone.

gitea somewhat recently also added support for some 2fa stuff too. I haven't played with it yet but it seems like auth is being taken seriously there.

It's worth mentioning the reasoning behind the project: It's a fork of Gogs. It was created because the community didn't like that Gogs was structured to be owned under 1 person (who was often slow to accept PRs, disappeared occasionally for short periods of time...)

It's listed in the article

I’m only half joking when I say VSTS is a pretty strong contender in the code+issues space, especially if you need more complex features for CI/CD.

For obvious reasons it’s not a good option if you are switching from Github out of fear of Microsoft (which is presumably the reason it’s not listed in the article).

Free private repos too.

The site is so fucking slow though.

Enough with this.

Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella?

Github was not a non-profit company. But you were willing to upload your private repo there. And somehow now it is problematic.

>Enough with this.

As if, Dad.

> Does anyone have any hard evidence that SV Angel, or IVP, or Thrive Capital, or Sequoia Capital, or Andreessen Horowitz (the main investors in GitHub), had more noble intentions, or management style than Microsoft of Nadella?

Microsoft has a history of being horrible and worse to the open source community. Now, they may be trying to change that, but GitHub didn't have that history.

Microsoft have baggage, and well-deserved baggage, when it comes to the open source world.

Can I trust that they won't go back to their old tricks in five years? I don't know. But that's how long I need to use an ecosystem to justify hitching my horse to it, right now. (As a management decision).

> And somehow now it is problematic.

As far as I know, Github hasn't delivered a surveillance, keylogging Operating System. They haven't used deceptive practices in getting users to upgrade to Windows 10 (leading to class-action suits).

Too many people are stating as fact that Microsoft is not the same company they were 5 years ago. They are right... I think they are worse.

And yet the good GitHub sold your private repos to the highest (and according to you the most evil) bidder.

It's a bit of a stretch to call GitHub good from the statement I made or to call Microsoft the most evil bidder when evil will suffice. I'll have to chalk that up to unnecessary sarcasm on your part.

To get back on track... I find it astounding that there are people actually defending any worldwide multi-billion dollar corporation whose actions are so incredibly user-hostile. Ideally, I would love to see this turn into a historical crossroads of sorts...

A point where end-users, who have the real power here to actually say "enough already" and make this purchase absolutely worthless. Instead of continuing to give the powerful more power and complain about it, to take that power back. In essence, to send a statement that an Open Internet can still exist.

That it doesn't have to be the cesspool of surveillance, backdoors, keyloggers, data-sharing and hording run by a few Tech Giants with zero accountability. A GitHub exodus (ie, The Great GitHub Exodus) can represent that with Microsoft (and others like them) choking on their dirty billions.

Also Kallithea.

https://kallithea-scm.org/

I guess it's a wiki so I could add it myself, but apparently you need a github account to edit this wiki?

I am a happy gitlab.com user. However, with all of this week's news I decided to see what it would take to run my own GitLab instance. I was surprised to find that on Digital Ocean and AWS Lightsail the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user. Any cheaper/smaller instances were to anemic to run GitLab at all. Seems like there are some performance issues to deal with there.

I run a small gitlab instance on a $14/mo OVH instance and have been quite happy. I used to run on the smaller version and it was still OK.

For a small instance, I get away with running an instance of Gitea on a 2.49€/mo VPS.

GitLab is a Rails app, what did you expect? /s We use gitea (written in Go), it runs well on more modest hardware.

Why the sarcasm? Rails is a pig.

Probably because GitHub is also built on Rails.

I wonder if there's a chance GitLab will be rewritten in a more efficient language.

GitLab VPE here. We are starting to re-write performance intensive part of our application in Golang. E.g. our Gitaly project: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly

That's awesome. Great choice of a language. We just moved to Gitlab internally (we were actually starting to do so before the MSFT news). Very happy so far. Looking forward to speed improvements.

Bitbucket On-Prem (aka Bitbucket Server) is pure Java + direct git invocations, so runs very nicely on modest hardware. Can get by on 1GB RAM! (But more recommended if you have more than 10 users).

Doesn't it require Tomcat, Apache, Postgres/MySQL? I've recently installed Jira Core and Confluece for a client and they hardly seem lightweight web apps.

> the one-click GitLab installs required an instance that costs ~$40 per month just for me, one user

Maybe the Digital Ocean 1-click install requires this... but GitLab will run on a Raspberry Pi 2[1]... which is pretty darn low specs.

From the GitLab minimum requirements, it basically just needs 1 cpu core, and 1 GB of ram, plus some swap (if you go that low in ram)[2]

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/installation/#raspberry-pi-2

[2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html#cpu

GitLab VPE here. We're working on Dockerized version that will run in a Kubernetes cluster, which should make this easier, assuming you've already made that investment in your infrastructure.

More pertinent to your concern about cost: It should make it easier for PaaS' who are k8s-based to run it for you and perhaps provide a lower price point.

For all the complaints about Microsoft, I've yet to hear what they could do that would be so bad? Change the homepage to actually be useful? Improve the search? Give away free private repos?

Kill Atom was the most reasonable fear I heard. And I can’t see how that wouldn’t be a well founded fear. If I was Microsoft I wouldn’t want to keep paying devs to make two so similar products (atom, code). They are much more similar than e.g code/vs or github/vsts.

But even so: I agree the fear that the product will be worse in a few feels completely irrational.

What I can agree with is that it’s unfortunate that it’s no longer seen as a neutral ground for development. It felt almost like a standard or like a piece of infrastructure, rather than a for-profit. But that was of course never the case. But now it becomes obvious, which might fracture the community (it was very nice to have everything in one place - e.g package managers literally started drawing stuff from github links). The appearance of neutrality and trust was the #1 feature of GitHub. Everything else is polish. Microsoft will have to work hard to keep the #1 feature working.

Kill Electron would be the bigger fear. I know a lot of people don’t like it, but it has enabled so many more applications for Linux that killing it would be a major blow.

But... vs code is based on electron too.

We're actually working on 2 Electron apps for a very very large corporate client right now so how they handle Electron is definitely a concern for us.

Microsoft uses Electron for VS Code, SQL Operations Studio, Azure Storage Explorer, Teams Desktop, Skype, and many other tools, and it has major traction with Slack, the Github Desktop App, Discord, and many other big companies. It's not going anywhere.

They have a bunch of Electron-based products (VS Code, Teams), it's unlikely they'd kill Electron

And by far the most unfounded fear. As others have said MS has tons of their own apps using electron, to kill it would be to shoot themselves in both arms.

They could be pretty interested in shifting it away from Chromium an V8-based Node to something that uses platform webviews (Edge on Windows) and a platform-specific JS engine backing Node (ChakraCore on Windows). I believe they have posted open-source experimental forks in that direction in the past.

That's very different from killing it, but it could make developing or supporting Electron apps more difficult - plus the fear that it could then start sliding down the slope of the Windows version getting more investment, eventually leading to the classic "it's best on Windows" embrace/extend platform lockin. I'm not betting on that being their play, but I could see how people would worry...

The whole point of Electron is equal cross-platform abilities from a single code-base. Making it run "best on windows" is the complete opposite goal and rather silly considering they already have several native UI and app frameworks made for Windows.

But what does neutrality even mean? It's the git protocol, what is there to make non-neutral?

Not influenced by any of the major software giants. That’s about it.

Github is very little about git and mostly about the hub. The inertia is in the issue tracker, forks/stars/...

I see simply a generic fear of Microsoft, with their history of destructive acquisitions and unpleasant marketing strategies, doing something bad to GitHub users: something only they could do (involving LinkedIn, Windows, Visual Studio, etc.) and/or something that the far more harmless original GitHub wouldn't have considered.

From this point of view, speculation about what Microsoft could do is redundant; whatever they do, including nothing at all, will be considered suspect unless obviously harmful.

My fears, in no particular order:

- Worsen the usability of the site, introduce dark patterns

- Steal users' code (it has been rumored to happen before)

- Introduce mandatory usage of Microsoft accounts

- Gain a competitive advantage by spying on competitors' private repos

- Sell information about the users to the highest bidder

These are no alternatives. GitHub is a specialized social network with git hosting included.

Exactly this, feature comparisons completely miss the point imo. GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens. A CI/CD pipeline bolted on top or k8s integration do not replace the community that GitHub is home to.

"GitHub is the centralized place where 95% of open source happens."

Simply false statement.

But there's no real stickiness there. Developers are not mainstream users who want a dumb UX like Facebook, they're perfectly capable of creating an account (if they don't already have one) and interacting with a project wherever it is.

Most discussions are limited in scope to a project anyway so it's not like you need the whole site. What difference does it make to go visit issues on GitLab vs Github?

There is stickiness. Low entry burden for contributer is the key point why huge projects use GitHub instead of other platforms.

And me registering at dozen of platforms, reading the legal stuff, learning the platform,... And when I finally successful submit a one line patch (how: no idea) the maintainer has a fair 50% chance of dropping it. That is not what I will do. And I will not be alone :).

What? You can do the exact same thing in GitLab or Bitbucket in the same exact few clicks. Fork, edit, submit PR, done. Have you used these other platforms?

Yes I have. But like always with social networks it's about the critical mass (GitHub dwarves everything else) and public acceptance (like a company accepting this strange "Bitbucket"... :)).

There's also BitBucket's Paid Self-Hosted option, for 10 users, and a one-time payment of 10$. It even has a docker image.

https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=self-hosted

https://hub.docker.com/r/atlassian/bitbucket-server/

For those looking into this option, it is important to note that Bitbucket's self-hosted option is a separate codebase that started with no link to the cloud product.

Previously it was called Stash but was later rebranded to Bitbucket to reduce confusion.

Was not aware of this, thanks for the info.

Do you know if their enterprise edition is based on cloud or server?

If you mean the Data-Centre edition, it's based on Stash. Otherwise I'm not sure I've heard of that.

Here's the FAQ from when the change was made:

https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/bitbucket-r...

Honest question: Besides more traction among the open source community, where do you feel GitHub is stronger than GitLab?

I’m not affiliated with GitLab, however a little biased because we’re using GitLab instead of GitHub at our company.

Feature-wise, It seems to me that GitLab is running circles around GitHub. Curious about other opinions.

That's it, the open-source community is there. Performance doesn't really matter when there's tons of amazing projects being hosted in one place. If features were important, Gitlab would be more popular than Github.

Ehh, I think the community would move to a better site if there were distinguishing features. From a source-viewing and code-review perspective, they’re all more or less the same: basic.

The only reason some of my clients (of my own company) and some of the clients of my employer (so.. someone else's company) choose GitHub over GitLab is track record. GitLab isn't old enough with a long/stable enough track record to be considered on par. Feature- and functionality-wise, GitLab always wins.

A small, but second reason some of my clients and workgroups choose GitHub is pure because of the brand name, but I suppose that could be thrown in together with track record or age.

I like GitHub's UI better. I'm not even sure what is the latest iteration of GitLab UI. They change it in every release and it's a mess. I still can't find stuff.

Also, GitLab is slow. I'm sure that gitlab.com service would not way handle a fraction of GitHub's traffic without a complete rewrite or something like that.

I like GitLab as we have a CE installation that we depend on and I want it to be successful (which it already is I think). However personally it feels worse than GitHub on casual use.

GitLab is definitely slower. But the bigger problem for me is simply that the UI is unfamiliar. I'm honestly not sure if it's worse, it's just that I'm very used to Github by now. It's a bit "rock and hard place" for GitLab as I imagine they don't want to just carbon copy Github.

My company also uses gitlab, while it is visibly slower that's not a huge problem. For a smaller teams it's just a matter of throwing a decent server with a lot of RAM and the problem disappears. At least for my team it seems to be good in However I'm not sure how it would perform with significantly larger loads.

The network effect. I haven't seen it mentioned too much, so it worth thinking about it. The majority of the users won't leave and it's still one of the best places to collaborate with developers.

There's tons of search traffic going to GitHub issues.

GitLab's UI is in every way a travesty compared to GitHub's.

GitLab feels like using GitHub's UI from about 3 years ago. Here's a list of things missing, just to name a few:

    > consolidated reviews
    > multiple assigned people
    > reasonable diffs when merging complicated changes, ability to review code since it was last reviewed
    > easy to create merge requests, and plenty of context sensitive stuff
    > can generate comparisons of code online without creating a merge request

There's so many small UI/UX pain points

Take https://gitlab.com/coldnight/ci-test (which was the trending repo when I visited....):

    > The navigation is spread across:
      > The very top
      > The left hand side
      > An inline breadcrumbs below that
      > A bar in the middle of the screen
      > A bar below that
    > History button duplicates Commits button.
    > About 30% of the top of the UI is just useless filler - so the content on the page (the tree and the README - which is probably want I want when I visit a project) also consists of a small box in the bottom of the scren.

Compare https://github.com/fivethirtyeight/data (which is the top trending repo on Explore on GitHub!):

    > Much more consistent navigation - series of contextual bars which move down - so each page is more consistent

    > Much more of the screen is available for the tree / README

Hi richardwhiuk, GitLab team member here.

We appreciate open feedback, thank you for these UI details. We are very aware of the lack of polishing of our current project home page and missed opportunities. There is a specific issue on that we are working on for a July release right now, see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/44704. This is a first step of the larger effort we are tackling to improve the overall experience via https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/62. Please feel free to check these out and comment in the issue.

Regarding our navigation, we feel confident that the experience has been greatly improved with the new 10.0 UI. See https://about.gitlab.com/2017/09/13/unveiling-gitlabs-new-na... for some context. I’d like to encourage you to get involved and let us know what you think! You can always create an issue to contribute improving the GitLab experience.

Andreas Product Manager

Why are people jumping ship to lower quality services ? And I'm talking about unrecognizable brand names, because at least migrating to Gitlab or Bitbucket may be understandable in a way, but still an exageration in my opinion.

Because now github is owned by a company that was formerly very hostile to open source software, and this company is magically not.

Steve Ballmer is no longer CEO. Companies are run by people - they are not people.

And what makes you think 1) company culture is no longer a thing and 2) that microsoft won't swing back towards being openly hostile or worse, 'secretly hostile' towards open source software when someone else is at the healm?

I hope time will prove me wrong, but this acquisition is literally the 'embrace' phase of E3. Next comes the 'extend'.

Microsoft has shown themselves to be very pro-open-source in the last 5+ years. Just look at things like VS Code. Microsoft is just the Nickelback of software, its cool to hate on them for no real reason (any more).

Why would they acquire github just to turn on it and run it into the ground? You can do that if your users are locked-in or maybe you have a competing service but neither are the case here; there are numerous alternatives and it's pretty easy to switch, as we are already seeing. If they have anything but good intentions this would be just a giant waste of time/money.

I’m personally worried that they might do it unintentionally. They seem to be very good at mismanaging and fucking up all their mainstream products.

They did it with Skype. They don't have good but rather business minded intentions or how to make money from a product. This can change the product for the worse or at least for another audience (business users).

Lets rephrase that shall we "Why would they acquire Nokia just to turn on it and run it into the ground?"

It doesn't need malice but Microsoft have a talent for this kind of thing

The mobile hardware division of Nokia had been heading this way for a long time - I have no idea why they went through with that. Is it fair to say all Microsoft's attempts at hardware (except XBOX) have failed?

The other example would be the Kin phone. A feature complete working phone that Microsoft decided needed to be rewritten from scratch to use the Windows Mobile / Phone stack

It took 18 months and nearly $1B to rewrite only to find the market had moved on. Canned and written off

I can imagine a situation where Microsoft thinks that GitHub would benefit from being re-implemented using Microsoft tech. Rewriting in APS.net, using Microsoft Login, integration with Office 365. The whole enchilada :)

It would take years, cost billions and, at best, deliver exactly the same experience as GitHub today

Worse case would be that GitHub stagnates during the rewrite as the alternatives spend their time and money developing new features

People can decide who to work for. If they go to a company they probably like how it is when they join it, at least a little bit.

I was contacted by a recruiting firm for an interview in Microsoft, probably in the 90s or maybe in the early 2000s. I answered no thanks.

Of course they can, but this decision is based mostly on money. Most of the time, people would just pick the company that would offer them more.

Do you believe that on Mr Ballmer's last day he put the company culture into a box along with some desk plants and framed photos and walked out of the building with it?

Company culture doesn't transform within a few years.

I'm not sure how useful this comment is in that terse form... I've heard many voicing opinions that now is a good opportunity to jump to the superior Gitlab for reasons like self hosting if not for future proofing.

Edit: OK, this was in response to your unedited comment

Why is now a good opportunity compared to any other time?

From people I spoke to everyone seems concerned with what might happen. It is possible nothing bad happens at all but people cannot trust MS after what happened to a lot of the companies they acquired in the past.

I was alive when Microsoft was evil and I don't want my stuff to stay in a Microsoft service. I moved my pulic repositories to GitLab today. It's slower and it doesn't looks as nice but it's ok.

I self host my private repositories, no need of a third party service for that.

By the way, Bitbucket looks a little better than GitLab but its usability is abysmal. I always have troubles finding the things I want in there.

GitLab runs on Microsoft Azure. :)

I don't mind, as I don't mind that (another famous example) StackOverflow runs on Windows. They use what's best for them. I don't use MicroSoft directly but with all the stuff that they sold it's impossible to stay strictly clear from them. Examples: Windows powered ATMs and supermarket cash counters.

GitLab was migrating to the Google Cloud Platform: https://about.gitlab.com/2018/04/05/gke-gitlab-integration/

I do not know whether this migration has finished.