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Comment by celeritascelery | Hacker News Reader

it was interesting to read their reasons for not using github, especially related to no control over bans or sanctions. Microsoft could pull the rug out from under them at any time if they got pressure from somebody like China.

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Interesting to see China be used as the example. Github recently took action towards DMCA requests. Meanwhile, Github has been used as actively used as a safehaven from Chinese censors when it came to 996 protests and COVID information.

For sure, Github should be lauded for its policy towards China, they have absolutely done the right thing here. Even so, there's no guarantee that that would last forever, so it makes sense for a company like Wikimedia to host this themselves.

I'm not sure how GitLab is a better option. China could pressure them too.

GitLab is open source and can be self-hosted by Wikimedia.

They're selfhosting.

Oh I get it now thank you. I had read only the outcome part.

Is this GitLab open source, or is it GitLab enterprise on the free plan?

Because they are different products, even if the GitLab marketing pages make it appear as if they are the same.

Community Edition.

You can self host GitHub too

Source? I don't think that's true. Github has on-premises enterprise solutions but one should not confuse that with running free and open software on your own machines - https://enterprise.github.com/faq

I personally don't think anyone would confuse it, but the fact remains, you can host self GitHub. Maybe it costs, maybe it has string attached but ultimately the functionality is there... which makes it true.

If you pay the enterprise fee, which is likely an X amount per seat. They MIGHT give it out for free to Wikimedia as a favor / goodwill, but there will be strings attached.

(I'm not saying Gitlab doesn't have strings attached)

It's not open source, at best they ship you a locked down VM image to run yourself.

Edit: Confirmed, "GitHub Enterprise is delivered as a virtual appliance that includes all software required to get up and running. The only additional software required is a compatible virtual machine environment." https://enterprise.github.com/faq

This is not true, they publish the code at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab.

If you want to use premium features, you do have to pay to unlock them, and depending on your deployment you would need to get the gitlab-ee image instead of the gitlab-ce one.

We're talking about GitHub.

https://enterprise.github.com/faq

Which costs $21/user/month versus $0 for the free plan and $4 for the team plan. That's a steep price increase.

I was able to see Wikipedia uses something called openstack, but not the details of what infrastructure they host on. Anyone know what facilities these repos will ultimately be served from?

Wikimedia uses colocated boxes around the world at different providers, and the user facing stuff is backed by Cloudflare.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers

The user facing stuff is not backed by cloudflare (Cloudflare's magic transit has at some points been used to mitigate DDOS attacks at the IP layer, but otherwise cloudflare is not used. Wikimedia operates (its own) varnish servers in virginia, texas, san francisco, singapore and amsterdam to do frontend caching.)

Openstack is used for wikimedia cloud, which is a project to give volunteers compute resources to do cool projects (this includes domains wmcloud.org toolserver.org and wmflabs.org). Production does not use openstack.

Things like code review tools would be hosted in Virginia [eqiad] (with backup in texas [codfw]) on hardware owned by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Docs about how gerrit is hosted https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Gerrit if you want to know nitty gritty details see also https://github.com/wikimedia/puppet

Gitlab has no business in China.

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