I'm always curious why open source projects don't embrace an open platform, although I get that GitHub is fantastic in a lot of ways. I'm guilty of it myself, but I've reached the 50/50 GL/GH split as I try using GL more.
Yes, GitHub absolutely has a bunch of annoyances, too. (I listed a bunch of them here on HN in response to a question by Nat, just the other day!) If everyone were using GitLab first, we'd probably find excuses to put off switching to GitHub, too.
To attract users, you've got to have a pull. If that's "open source", then it needs to be a way in which the closed-source nature of GitHub is hurting my daily workflow. If it's "user interface", you need to be such an improvement over GitHub that it's worth the cost of switching. If it's "cost", that's tough because GitHub dropped prices and is now $0 for many users, and you probably don't want to get in a price war with Microsoft (see: Netscape).
It doesn't have to be the same pull for every customer, but every customer needs at least one.
"We're just as good as that big popular project" isn't a pull. I've seen hundreds of projects try that, and it never works.
1) it had a message that tells you that the elastic search is so much better and that your admin can enable it (if he would only switch to enterprise)
2) it pretends to have functionality only to have it hidden behind an "available in ee" banner
3) it has a new functionality where it annoys everyone that has a new ip (24h disconnect anyone) that can't be disabled (only through patching) and suggests that enabling 2fa helps, but is send regardless of 2fa
And every function that gets cut out and hidden behind the enterprise banner iy forever lost to you, because even if you implement it yourself it will nevet get merged since the function exists, in enterprise...
Ps yeah there is a free enterprise license for universities, but it is not available for staff or external users (other universities) and the licensing model is so unflexible that you can't mix "free for students" and "pay for staff" or "students get enterprise" and "staff get basic features"
Pps I had to patch out more than one thing over the years this was just the first thing that came to mind
On a positive note it got quite a bit more responsive in the last 4 or 5 five years since I started hosting it and even thought we got some regressions and bugs and problems with releases we didn't have any data loss (that we know of) or major security problems. Most of the security problems are in the enterprise functionality anyway (elasticsearch and grafana pop up regulary)
I understand your frustration with FOSS pushing you toward buying proprietary software.
But your lede will mislead people into thinking CE gets revenue by serving up third-party ads because that is what "ads" mean for web services 99.99% time the term is used on HN.
GitLab doesn't serve ads it only pushes out messages to users that they could have a better product if only the admin would shill out some bucks.
It's ok if admin settings are greyed out with a remark like in old freewares to tell you features you could have in the enterprise product, but if the software tells any user that they are missing out it is more unnescessary work for the admin to explain that we don't have the money to pay for every single student, most of which only create an account without pushing any code, just so that the search can work over all wikis and not only the selected one.
So again it's more like the "buy winrar" or "go pro now" nag and _not ads_. Sorry for the confusion
I'm really interested in the development of this issue so thank you again for reaching out.
git checkout master
git pull github/master
git push gitlab/master
git remote set-url --add origin ...
Or, I would have, if the builtin GitLab mirroring feature wasn't broken for pushing to GitHub.
And you don't exactly want to pitch to them how you don't have your code on Github because you use this other "fringe" service which even if they look at it they are going to find unfamiliar.
I now host 50/50 on Gitlab / Github because I'm not really affected by this, but I'm conscious of it.
It makes the modern web so much more pleasant, paradoxically by breaking it, now that user-hostile machinations are the norm.
And yes, gitlab's web interface is substantially more annoying than github, in my experience.
It's very easy to deploy, consumes few resources (you can run it on a low-end VPS). It even has Jenkins integration.
However I don't know how it scales to big teams and projects since I only use it for myself. And I'm not entirely convinced by its security track record, but it looks like things are improving.
However, I think GitLab can only really shine when you host it yourself. In 2020, on-premise/self-managed anything is kind of a hard sell, but the reliability and performance of gitlab.com leaves a lot to be desired. (So much so, I often think about trying to work for GitLab so I could help from a reliability perspective.) I stuck my neck out for GitLab in a previous organization and we ended up migrating from github.com to gitlab.com. This set me up for some embarrassment for every outage they experienced last year which felt surprisingly frequent. But if you have the resources, self-managed GitLab is great!
tl;dr: gitlab.your.org > github.com > gitlab.com