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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

Business models which leverage network effects often subsidize things to build out a network. I wouldn't feel bad about it.

That said, this move seems 100% reasonable. I care about having a free tier. If they were killing the free tier, I'd be sad. But if I'm not paying anything, I'm okay being required to make my CI/CD pipeline efficient for my benefactor. I'd even take less than 400, gladly.

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GitLab earned their market position by offering free private repos. They leveraged that position to get the funding to massively ramp up their enterprise features while GitHub was burdened with thousands of open source users. Now GitLab is cashing in and I don't blame them. Their product is excellent. It's basically an all-in-one package for small to mid tech orgs.

Given the rise of Sourcehut as some people's new goto and Github finally offering container registry, it seems like a good time to pull that trigger too. I as a whole like GitLab as an all-in-one solution.

I love Sourcehut, but Sourcehut's only competitive right now in the indie/free software enthusiast market. I doubt Gitlab views them as a major threat.

Much like Sourceforge isn’t and Bitbucket is not the same sort of competitor or threat as a couple of years ago. The private version that is sold (Stash?) could be though.

That is what GitHub thought about Gitlab

It's not the best comparison. Gitlab is VC-backed, whereas Sourcehut aims for slow, sustainable growth. Plus, the UX decisions of Sourcehut are so drastically different from Gitlab/Github that it doesn't threaten existing customers very much.

Rise is a bit much. We barely think of the public facing Bitbucket or Sourceforge. I bet both are bigger than Sourcehut still.

I was rooting for Bitbucket and Mercurial 7 years ago. Shame.

I was rooting for Mercurial or any other to get a minority but significant market share. I don’t like mono cultures. Ah well.

> I wouldn't feel bad about it.

I don't think he feels guilty. I think he feels the risk of becoming dependent upon a service when the service is clearly unprofitable.

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