Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor | Hacker News Reader

Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

techcrunch.com

102 pointsm-watson81 comments

> There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it

Seems odd that he wouldn’t know about Sourcehut (2018) and Gitea (2016).

And Codeberg (2019), which was based on Gitea until they forked it into Forgejo (2022).

Codeberg is a service not a separate software. Just like you wouldn't count salsa.debian.org or framagit.org as separate from GitLab, they are the same with maybe some local customization.

At this point Codeberg is clearly distinct from Gitea and is more thoroughly open-source in its nature than anything Harness is going to bring out, but yes, you could combine it with Forgejo if that feels more fair.

At this point Codeberg is running Forgejo not Gitea.

Yes, that's what I was saying.

Mind you I use (and thus pay for) Sourcehut: the vast majority of folks won't be cross shopping Sourcehut and GitHub. As it stands now the UX is (to put it charitably) bad. There's a lot to like, but overall Sourcehut is disjointed rather than cohesive. The workflow itself is also an acquired taste. With a bit of spit and polish Sourcehut could be quite nice to use, but it's not there yet. Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

The others mentioned are more or less knockoffs of GitHub, because at one point GitHub was quite worth emulating.

> Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

Drew would never.

Yeah, ideally he wouldn't.

I bet there will be more sourcehut customers than this person’s new offering.

He doesn’t even know his competitors.

Very possible. SourceHut is great and seems to be most popular with developers and open source teams (although I'm sure they also have corporate users too). We are more focused on companies and enterprises. These are different segments of the market with different needs. The former also tends to have higher user counts with lower average deal size, while the latter has lower user counts with very high average deal size.

With that being said, Gitness is a rebranding of Drone, which has 10,000+ active installations so I would say we are off to a pretty good start!

And Onedev also : https://github.com/theonedev/onedev

This is probably my fault. Internally at Harness I have been hyping this launch as a "once in a decade" event. That unfortunately got translated into "first in a decade" when it hit the press. I do think the launch of a new, major open source Source Control system with kind of investment (12 full time engineers and counting) is a rare event, but I do wish it was worded differently. Nothing we can do about it now!

How does Gitness differ from already existing open source alternatives, such as Gitlab, Gitea, Gogs, Forgejo, Codeberg, Gitweb?

Gitness actually launched in 2012 under the name Drone, with a focus on continuous integration. So Gitness has a very strong, mature pipeline engine that is also very popular in the Gogs and Gitea community (Gitness is backward compatible with any Drone yaml). Of course, this is just our initial launch which is a very important milestone, but we have a lot of feature gaps and a lot of work to do to make our Code Hosting solution a more interesting replacement. Stay tuned.

Edit: if you have feature requests, let us know!

Also Forgejo (2022)…

They definitely know about Gitea – though they don't acknowledge it, it's partly based on Gitea. https://github.com/harness/gitness/pull/3364/files#diff-4673...

I won't trust Harness with anything open source. It's the same company that killed the open source Drone CI after acquiring it. They changed the license such that you could contribute to it but could not use it if your revenue was more than 1 million USD. They didn't fix bugs that were well known to them because they were working on the enterprise version of it.

I may be wrong but I think that DroneCI did not change its license. Before you could use it for free if your revenue was less than 1 million USD which is what is now.

They did change it, but they changed it two years before the acquisition [0].

[0] https://github.com/harness/gitness/commit/ce3855812bb00dbf19...

I went to check on this, and it seems that https://github.com/harness/drone redirects to harness/gitness. I'm now very confused.

The "Community Edition" links on https://docs.drone.io/ are all broken because of this.

Gitness is a continuation of Drone: they incorporated it in one big PR [0].

Cynically, when coupled with the CTA to star on GitHub, it feels like they did it this way to preserve the star and fork counts.

[0] https://github.com/harness/gitness/pull/3364/

Nothing cynical about that statement. We definitely want to preserve the star counts! But as the founder of Drone, and Head of Product for Gitness, I see Gitness as the next major version of Drone. Gitness is built on the Drone pipeline engine and uses significant amounts of Drone code. And in the coming months, when you upgrade to the latest version of Drone you will get Gitness. So to me, they are one and the same.

I get that you feel that they're the same, and that makes sense since you founded both projects. But what is publicly visible communicates something very different.

For example, the press release entitled "Harness Releases Gitness" is clearly describing the release of a new Harness product, not a rebranding of Drone [0]. And your README doesn't say anything like "Gitness is Drone 3.0", it says it's "powered by Drone".

You also didn't merge in a branch that built Gitness on top of Drone. Instead there's one commit that removes every single line of Drone code [1] and then another one that adds all of Gitness [2]. There's no continuity in the history between Drone and Gitness; Gitness effectively originates in one big "Initial commit" that just happens to be in the same GitHub repo as Drone used to be.

Two thirds of those stars were earned before Harness even acquired Drone [3], and it feels weird to me to see them used to push Harness's strategic move into Git hosting, even if that move is led by Drone's founder.

[0] https://www.harness.io/blog/harness-releases-gitness-open-so...

[1] https://github.com/harness/gitness/commit/7ab205375f34ab3850...

[2] https://github.com/harness/gitness/commit/e0aa6cb81ae73c0877...

[3] https://star-history.com/#harness/drone

So the only place I can find the last version of Drone is https://github.com/harness/gitness/tree/v2.20.0

You don't see how that's a bit ridiculous?

https://github.com/drone/drone redirects to harness/gitness too, leaving the entire https://github.com/drone organization without its major repo. Not to mention, again, that all GitHub links on https://www.drone.io/ are now 404.

> That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness.

Wouldn’t this violate the git trademark policy?

https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

From that link:

>> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.

You might be right, but there are already many products out there that have been violating that trademark policy for quite some time, e.g. GitLab, GitKraken, SmartGit, ...

My guess is that Software Freedom Conservancy (a nonprofit) has more important things to do than go after those projects for trademark policy violations.

Some of those were specifically grandfathered in to the policy [0]:

> Careful readers among you may now be wondering about GitHub, GitLab, Gitolite, etc. And now we get back to why it took over a year to get the trademark granted.

> The USPTO initially rejected our application as confusingly similar to the existing trademark on GitHub, which was filed in 2008. While one might imagine where the "Git" in GitHub comes from, by the time we applied to the USPTO, both marks had been widely used in parallel for years. So we worked out an agreement with GitHub which basically says "we are mutually OK with the other trademark existing".

> So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist.

[0] https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

That's kind of an unfair advantage for github.

I'm pretty sure that many beginners think that git == github.

Wonder how that would have shaken out, had MS bought GH in 2013 instead of 2018.

Seems weird to still go for that policy knowing that GitHub would be immune to it. I get wanting to defend the trademark but once the cat is out of the bag (which in this case means GitHub's name being immune to said trademark), it just ends up leading to a pretty unfair market advantage for them no?

I'm sure their reasoning makes sense and that this has been taken into consideration by the git project at the time though, so I'll have to look into it!

You can put whatever you like in your policy documents. Doesn't mean other people have to care, or that it's legally enforceable.

In general, in open source, we try to respect the wishes of the developers who make our project possible regardless of whether said developers could or would pursue litigation. If a project fails to do so that's a bad sign for the future.

Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor which hosts their open-source code...on GitHub... with a prominent call to arms on their landing page to star their repository...on GitHub...

If you don't even use your own product why should anyone else use it?

Perhaps it’s a mirror just to try to draw people in? If you wanted to start a new social network you would market the hell out of it on Facebook so

I assume that they used GitHub during the development of Gitness.

It would be a bit risky to build your new git competitor inside itself, surely?

It's also kinda a hallmark of a mature computer anything to use itself in some way.

You bootstrap your compiler using another until you can self compile. You write a build tool plugin which uses an older version of itself to enhance its own build. Intel probably uses intel chips to design future intel chips. It happens all the time and aesthetically computer nerds are drawn to this type of beauty.

From elsewhere in the thread:

> We have been using Gitness to develop Gitness for the last 6 months. We do mirror on GitHub as a backup. But we also want to meet the community where they exist today, which is GitHub.

We have been using Gitness to develop Gitness for the last 6 months. We do mirror on GitHub as a backup. But we also want to meet the community where they exist today, which is GitHub.

If you don't mind me asking since you're here: will you be implementing ForgeFed in Gitness [0]? My sense is that federation is our best hope for breaking GitHub's network effects, and I'd love to see more projects like yours join the protocol.

[0] https://forgefed.org/

Thank you for the suggestion. We will look into it.

Could you provide some sort of status report about what Gitness actually is? According to the Git repo it looks like it started Feb 2, 2014, and Brad Rydzewski did the vast majority of the work on the project (e.g., 100x more than anybody else), and is still involved now. I downloaded it and tried it out (which is VERY easy to do), and the actual software seems to be a Typescript frontend and Go backend, with Monaco for a code editor, and nice diff view. I tried importing a very large repository, and it took a while, but did fully work, and browsing the repo after import was fast. It's Apache-2.0 licensed (thanks!). Was it open source from the beginning?

Gitness brings code hosting and pipeline execution together. It builds on top of the Drone continuous integration system, which Harness acquired. Brad was directly involved, but this time he had the help of 12 full time developers

Do you do code reviews during development?

I ran it locally and couldn't find my way to go from a conversation to its code context. Nothing is clickable. Screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/kk8wLIK

Thank you for the feedback. We are working on addressing this soon.

Reminds of the GitHub issue for hosting Gitea on Gitea, it's... a read to be sure: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

I run the Gitness Project at Harness (also Founded Drone, on which this is based). It was mentioned by another Harness employee, but we have been dogfooding Gitness internally for the past 6 months. The project is entirely self-hosted at this point.

There was a lot of discussion internally about what message it would send if we also published the source code on GitHub. I was very adamant that we need to host on GitHub because this is where Open Source collaboration happens today, and we need to meet developers where they are today.

No shame here.

It is important to remember that Gitea is a very popular project and is a success by any measure with tens of thousands of installs, and they host on GitHub. I don't think that detracts from how awesome their product is. GitLab also hosted on GitHub in the early days to grow their community.

I definitely hope that one day, developers will love Gitness as much as they love GitHub, and they will choose Gitness to host their Open Source communities. But that will take a lot of time and a lot of work. We are here for it, but today is just a humble day 1 launch. We have years of work ahead of us.

How does this compare to e.g. Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, self-hosted GitLab, or other alternatives?

Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions).

While the Pipelines UI looks nice, it hides all the very real details of deployment (and configuration) in a variety of environments. This is one thing Forgejo does well compared to e.g. Gitea for CI/CD, thanks to being very flexible in configuring runner secrets, registering runners, and so on. The runners themselves are also designed to run with rootless docker-in-docker. There is also the security aspect to consider. e.g. how does Pipelines prevent secrets from spilling in logs or people running bitcoin miners in CI? Does it offer a better level of security than Forgejo/Gitea here?

The reason I am emphasizing CI/CD is because hosting code and a bug tracker is only one small aspect of GitHub IMO. The real big things are its popularity and GitHub Actions. It's not enough for many people (and businesses) to simply host code anymore. Many now expect commits pushed to certain branches to execute a variety of workflows -- from unit tests to full-on Kubernetes deployments.

Harness actually came from the opposite direction where they started out with CD, bought a CI comment (drone.io if memory serves) and are now introducing git hosting. So it's likely CI/CD is better than the git hosting

> Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions).

This is also part of Gitea. Which makes since because Forgejo is a soft-fork of Gitea.

Thye aren't really competing with GitHub, which is more of consumer tool, but more with the enterprise focused GitLab which bundles CI/CD along with code hosting and bunch of other things.

Their focus is primarilily on Enterprise developer needs and bundling CI/CD, Internal Developer Platforms, Security, Compliance and now code hosting. They want to be the one shop for everything developer experience inside an enterprise.

[Source: Not a customer or a user or employee, was at their conference in SF today]

I hate to focus on this, but the website, https://gitness.com/, is absolutely horrible. Especially on mobile. The scrolljacking seems outright hostile and the entire site feels janky and broken. You don't need scrolljacking to provide a compelling or visually differentiated design experience.

I was looking for the code and that "Star us on GitHub" link isn't great. I want to see the code, not star the repo; is that link going to star the repo?

(it doesn't, is just a link to the github repo)

please submit original sources <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37597901

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37600545 (I would argue for this one, since it provides the most context)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37601002

They should host a demo instance like Gitea does.

Thank you for the feedback! We are planning on working on it.

Is dark mode available or am I overlooking it?

Pretty impressive so far, the pipeline tool is surprisingly robust already.

"gist-like" snippet management would be awesome in this.

Yes. Dark mode is coming. Code Snippet management is a great suggestion and we will absolutely pick this up. Thanks for testing it out. Hit us up in our Slack channel if you have any future suggestions or if there is anything we can do to help.

So here's the GitHub project: https://github.com/harness/gitness

How does the project already have 27k stars? Surely this was not public before?

Or do you think drone always had this product?

Looking at the forks list, it looks like they converted their old "drone" repo into the "gitness" repo:

https://github.com/harness/gitness/forks

So the stars all carried over.

The old drone link now redirects to gitness:

https://github.com/harness/drone

You are right, this PR is where they introduced git to drone: https://github.com/harness/gitness/pull/3364/

Would have been awesome to see this as a separate project, but I guess they would like to ride the drone CI wave. I like drone, unsure about including git in there

I see Gitness as the evolution of Drone. We are using the Drone pipeline engine and a ton of Drone code under the hood, but we are also adding Code hosting capabilities. And at some point, when you upgrade to the next major version of Drone, you will actually be upgrading to Gitness.

I should mentioned that we will never force you to host your code on Gitness. You will be able to use Gitness Pipelines with other code hosting providers, including Gitea.

I think the challenge with starting a new project is that it would result in Drone feeling completely abandoned because there would be zero investment going forward. We want to bring the community with us. I really do think Harness is breathing new life into the Drone project with this rebranding (12 full time developers and counting) and I am really excited to see where we are a year from now.

PS glad to hear you like Drone. I hope you will consider testing out Gitness at some point and letting us know what you think. It is still early days, but the team is making improvements daily. Hit us up in our Slack channel if there is anything we can do to help.

We felt like bringing CI and SCM together was a natural evolution for the project. It is something Brad, the creator of Drone, always envisioned. Harness and its Founder, Jyoti, shared the vision and made a big investment in making this happen. It is awesome to see this breathe new life into a great open source project

It is interesting how many teams and even large businesses fall into the github/gitlab/atlassian trap. I worked for a couple that spend a shit-ton of money to have some measure of "cloud agnostics" while they throw out their Jenkins servers and they migrate all of their cicd to github, gitlab or atlassian. With github it is a SaaS service. With Gitlab, they have an "enterprise" version. In quotes because the "enterprise" version has no scaling support. You can't run more than one active node. And if you use their special "geo" feature for read only nodes they can't run cicd. It is really ridiculous any large business would migrate from a couple of fleets of Jenkins to this. But hey, gotta do what business decided to do.

When you say Gitlab "enterprise" is this the on-prem version or something else? They do have SaaS too right?

Oh, the typical TechCrunch crap again - this is NOT a GitHub competitor!

Interestingly it looks like this is partly a fork of Gitea (or at least, incorporates large amounts of code from Gitea): https://github.com/harness/gitness/pull/3364/files#diff-4673...

It is largely based on the existing Drone repository, but for Git capabilities we used the Gitea fork of https://github.com/gogs/git-module

I see, thanks for the clarification.

I can’t find any screenshots, am I missing something?

Here’s a short overview video of the product. https://youtu.be/TDEIiVuM6IY?si=MFP6bpMMUGMxUQCp

that was helpful, thank you

"upgrade to harness software delivery platform" <https://youtu.be/TDEIiVuM6IY?t=96> ... to do what? https://docs.gitness.com/ makes no such mention of upgrading or why anyone would want to

and of course it's got all the AIz https://youtu.be/TDEIiVuM6IY?t=118 which I'd presume is this https://www.harness.io/products/aida and yet https://www.harness.io/legal/aida-terms says "AIDA may utilize multiple generative AI systems, including those from third parties, to generate Output. These systems may include various models, algorithms, and datasets. As a result, the Output generated by AIDA may incorporate contributions from different sources. Harness is not responsible for such third parties’ acts or omissions in relation to the processing of Submissions, or generation of Output." which feels kind of like a cop-out in a document entitled "AIDA Terms"

Gitness is built around Drone CI... Oh reading the comments, it's an extension of Drone.

How compatible have Drone CI and it's open-source fork Woodpecker? I'm curious whether one might expect any kind of engine swap to work.

I'm not convinced but it only being gotten on GitHub…

I understand it being on GitHub because that might get them more traction, but should the not be hiding primarily on their own text?

Gitness. Silly name, sounds like and adjective and is only a letter away from gitless.

Good name.

It is a portmanteau of Git and Harness

looks more complicated than forgeo/gitea . gitea already servers all github needs for us

What's the differentiator for this? Tighter integration into their other offerings?

I can't find any git repos on gitness.com, where are they?

We have not launched our saas version yet. Our first launch focused on the open source, self hosted version. Saas version will be coming soon. Please stay tuned.

Great. If possible, it would be great if Gitness (both the SaaS and FOSS self-hosted version) could have enough of an API that Software Heritage could list and archive all repos (and maybe even get notifications on updates). It would also be great if you could use server-side rendering instead of JavaScript for most pages so that search engines and archiving tools can easily save all the data.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/ https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/ArchiveBot

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