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Comment by isomorphic | Hacker News Reader

Google is a giant single point of failure. Others would rush to fill the vacuum, but it'd be a brutal few months (years) while we all relied upon Bing.

Is there any GitHub-esque outfit waiting in the wings that provides free OSS hosting?

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https://bitbucket.org/

https://www.codebasehq.com/

https://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/

https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

I must admit, I rather like bitbucket, you can get free private repositories with them too.

I can really recommend the open source gitlab for self hosting repos. I have been running it on a ec2 micro instance for 5-10 people over years without a single problem.

https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq

Now there is a FOSS project one might have expected to dogfood. Nothing beats free... b^)

They do: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/. They maintain a Github mirror to allow for easier contribution. Github is more than just a version control software; it's a community.

Thanks for mentioning GitLab, we offer unlimited private repo's and collaborators and an on-premises version too.

We've been happily using GitLab for months now, can't recommend it highly enough. If there was an open source bug tracking/ticket app that played nicely with it I'd switch all of our teams over to it sooner rather than later.

GitLab is great for lots of projects; especially internal ones. The inability to control your splash page makes it less than ideal for OSS projects trying to be welcoming to newbies though. (When you navigate to a project page, instead of displaying the readme, it just shows recent commits, etc, which is nice for people working on the project but completely irrelevant to end users.)

It has it's own issue tracking, as well as wikies and everything else github offers.

It does but GitLabs ticket capabilities are very, very basic.

I've tried a few and as far as I can tell they're all pretty good but not quite there.

There's also SourceForge, which hosts SVN, Git, Hg, etc and is the largest host of FLOSS applications (Git is the largest host of FLOSS components and web code).

I'm not sure if it's still the case, but SourceForge used to have an approval process to get a new project / repo set up, which defeats a lot of the utility of GitHub for being able to store whatever projects you want to toss up there.

I don't recall that ever being the case. And I've used SourceForge since 2005.

I remember it being the case in 2007/2008. This is the closest thing I could find to a citation. http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/4439/Getting-started-wit...

"To create a new project you simply register at SourceForge and then submit a new project request. Most projects are approved immediately, and you'll typically get an email notifying you of the approval in ~ 24 hours "

It might have happened between when I'd originally registered and the present. It does make sense as SourceForge was providing free FTP uploads for binaries at the time and the automated tools to handle abuse were pretty poor. Lots of folks were looking to abuse it for bandwidth and malware distribution. The tools are better now, which is one reason Github finally added binary releases last year.

There's also Gitorious:

https://gitorious.org/

Used by projects like Qt, GnuTLS, Haiku and CMake.

I really like bitbucket. They don't have as many features, but free private repos, unlimited academic repos, means I'm not actually a GitHub user, except for the OSS projects that insist on GitHub.

If Google goes down, go with duckduckgo instead of bing please :)

They're an anonymising frontend to bing with a number of extra search utilities.

No, they're not. They have their own crawler and everything.

That is an incorrect massive oversimplification from what I understand:

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

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