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Comment by krelian | Hacker News Reader

I never checked out gitlab but the name always made it seem like a github copycat. If you want to differentiate your product why not choose a name that rings different to your competitor?

And now I finally went and browsed some repositories and it's clear as that they were very much "inspired" but Github's design, it's practically a github clone, at least in that regard (although something is a bit off in the smoothness)

Maybe one day I'll find myself in a similar position and see things differently but this blatant copying always seemed ridiculous to the point where I would feel ashamed to lead this type of strategy.

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I don't want to sound pedantic but this comment makes you look extremely ignorant and unaware of this space and its solutions, use cases, etc. Basically you sound completely oblivious of what's going on here.

If today was the first day that you saw GitLab, perhaps you don't have the domain knowledge to make any of this claims. Nothing you said here makes sense. The Git as a prefix in the name is just a technicality, the same way I could create an operating system called YeahOS and everyone would understand that OS is a suffix that blends into the branding.

But what makes you sound particularly ignorant it's calling GitLab a clone of Github. They are both git platforms, that's it. By that metric BitBucket, Gitea, Gogs, CodeCommit, Phabricator, etc., are all clones of GitHub.

If anything, recent GitHub functionalities like GitHub Actions are a clone of mature GitLab functionality like GitLab's CI.

>the same way I could create an operating system called YeahOS and everyone would understand that OS is a suffix that blends into the branding

Yet if you named it myOS and copied the look and feel from iOS everyone could see that you created an iOS clone.

That's the only point I was making but seems that many feelings were hurt in the process.

It's all fair. Looking back at my comment I sounded a little bit harsh and I apologize for that.

What I was trying to establish is that there's really no solid ground to claim that any Git platform is a copy of another one since they are all essentially productivity and team-work wrappers around Git.

If you're talking about the general information architecture that's how SourceForge was even before Git existed, so hardly an original idea.

>no solid ground to claim that any Git platform is a copy of another

I think that's fairly obvious. I guess I didn't explain clear enough the point I was trying to make in the original post. I kind of regret writing it now.

I think it's fair to say that a few years ago GitLab was very much inspired by Github's design. However the project has had a focus on adding additional, tightly-integrated features and I'd say in the last couple of years Github has been more inspired by GitLab than the other way around.

GitHub and GitLab, Gitea etc are all centred around git, so including "Git" in the name seems like an obvious, sensible even, idea.

Personally I don't think the GitLab UI looks that similar to GitHub's, and to me it looks and feels kind of clunky, and lacks contrast.

The important difference is that GitLab is open source! That's a bit like critizing LibreOffice for "copying" MS Office and using the word "Office" in its name.

Hi, Developer Evangelist at GitLab here.

GitLab Core is open source which is the base for the Community Edition. The paid tiers are based on Core and add Enterprise licensed proprietary code, following our open core business model.

More about our Open Source stewardship: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/

You could not be farther from the truth. Gitlab is an improvement on Github in every way, they offer a suite of features that Github doesn't have that are only available through third party connections.

Gitlab is not a Github clone.

A few years ago, Gitlab was indeed mostly a clone of Github. The thing is during these few years I personally think Gitlab became far superior to Github in terms of "turn key" solution to manage your software. Now, Github is the one "stealing" ideas from Gitlab, with for example their Actions.

That two services based on git have git in their names seems reasonable. That's the only commonality... "hub" and "lab" are both one syllable, but very different in sound and connotation.

Both are just fancy wrappers and tools built around GIT. It's not surprising that one looks like the other. Given historic exoduses from one, it's only logical the other would build a similar toolset with the intention of allow for easy migrations between platforms.

While similar, the companies are different in the approaches, the platforms are different in their pricing (both having impacted the other which ultimately has helped consumers).

Your argument would hold true of any word processor. I think it's an unfair assessment of two products targeting the same specific users.

People wanted a decentralized GitHub. That's why they built it like GitHub, except decentralized.

If you think Gitlab’s a Github clone you must not have seen Gitea.

I agree that Gitea looks a lot more like Github (but with a dark theme!), and I think this is a good thing. I also like Gitea because it doesn't have reCaptcha or other proprietary components, but it doesn't seem to have the advanced ('Enterprise') features that Gitlab does (I program as a hobby so I've never needed these). When Gitea has grown and is more accepted, I hope the Wikimedia Foundation will consider using it.

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