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Comment by mort96 | Hacker News Reader

If you're a big company, you can afford having one engineer spend one or two days per year to maintain your self-hosted GitLab or Forgejo. On top of better reliability than GitHub, you'll get the additional bonus that your source code won't accidentally leak through being in Copilot's training set.

If you're a hobbyist, Codeberg is great, has a nice community and automatically shields you from slop contributions.

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Speaking from experience, it cost mW about a week or two per year to maintain GitLab for the startup I worked at.

My personal GitLab on the other hand really does take only a day or two per year.

That said, a week or two per year is just what it costs to maintain any one thing period. I spent about that much time maintaining PCs in the office, or my personal proxmox setup. It's not onerous at all.

GitLab is super bloated and a little sucky to admin, but it's not too bad all things considered. I'm admin in my new job's GitHub org and it sucks a whole lot more to maintain.

The issue with these systems is that they lack Github's sophistication for issue tracking, knowledge transfer, and automation. I think Gitlab is a mature product in its own space and unlikey to change, for instance, at this point.

Codeberg also has the issue of having a political stance which means they will not accept just anyone's use of the platform. That is absolutely their right and I have no issue with it, but it's unattractive to me - as someone who agrees with most of their current politics - because the day they decide they don't like me, I'm screwed.

I never found GitHub's systems for issue tracking to be all that great. Cross-repository issues and development plans are hard to track within a git host. I've always used an external panning and issue tracking tool, mostly Linear, and it works really well. GitLab's Linear integration is excellent, FWIW.

I've actually worked with a couple of companies who do use GitHub for their code, and they all use Linear in addition to GitHub.

I understand the concern you're talking about wrt. Codeberg, but I wouldn't view it as a significantly bigger risk than anything else. Any platform can suddenly decide that your project is against ToS (GitHub will absolutely not accept just anyone's use of their platform either) and Codeberg introducing some rules recently doesn't, in my mind, drastically increase the risk of a dramatic ToS change in the future. But we all have to make our own risk evaluations and I won't judge yours. Luckily, moving between Git hosts isn't that difficult; setting up CI again and losing merge request history does suck but it's not the end of the world, unlike something like, say, losing your AWS/GCP/whatever account.

"sophistication" seems like a strange way to describe GitHub to me - I've found in every individual aspect (code browsing, issue tracking, code review, package management, etc), it's the worst out of all the systems I use regularly... But it's good _enough_ for most people, and it has all those features in one place, which is more convenient than wrangling 10-15 high quality but disconnected systems

Gitlab has the benefit of having very little traffic, both free and paid. Their limits are still way above the current usage so less likely to be an issue

Worth mentioning GitLab's paid enterprise offering are more expensive than GitHub's, on a per-seat basis.

Lots of companies moved because it was cheap, but it's not anymore. Ironic that companies might choose to migrate to them now for stability, rather than price.

GitLab has its own problems. It might be somewhat more available than GitHub lately, but it too is not immune to incidents, particularly involving workflow dispatch and managed runner availability.

Plus the UX isn’t nearly as good. Sometimes it feels downright clunky in comparison.

Dude no one uses github tracking for anything serious, come on. The only thing github has over gitea/forgejo is discussions. That's the only real social "innovation" github has contributed to open source development and it's just a shitty tacked on forum.

Also for accuracy, Codeberg has a pro-human and anti-corporation stance. Both of which are definitely en vogue at the moment.

Much better than GitHub's pro slop sentiment, which is doing nothing but destroy their reputation.

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