GitLab CEO here, I would love to discuss what people think about this and any questions please have about moving their code.
There is an opening for someone to provide gratis gitlab CE or other exclusively free software based git hosting.
That said I do hope you take steps to reassure people who want to be using an option which preserves their software freedom, for example that the CE will not be slowly deprecated, more features moving into EE.
I admit that making a fully credible commitment is challenging: options include multi-copyrightholder-copyleft which presumably you don't want at all as an MIT licensed project + some proprietary bits in EE, and a variation on the Fiduciary License Agreement used for Qt. But those two options are copyright-focused; there are probably other mechanisms to be thought of.
Recently Gitlab CE has undergone some quite significant UI updates along with very noticeable performance improvements. Excellent work guys!
Signed: a very happy Gitlab CE user.
But adding more features to the open source version every month is great. Hopefully that and a massive userbase sums to making it obvious that any substantial move towards deprecating the open source version will lead to a successful hostile fork, as there will be tons of people able and interested in doing that if necessary, resulting in you never making it necessary. :)
It is sad that enterprises are confused by freedom rather than demanding of it, but that's an issue for the software freedom movement to solve.
On another note, https://about.gitlab.com/better-than-github/ is a well done page. I wish you maximum success.
And yes, the huge community around GitLab will ensure a fork if we turn evil and start crippling the open source version.
Glad you like our comparison page with GitHub :)
It didn't quite fit into our workflow - I think we would like to use gitlab as a beautiful web client, but then push our code there back into our own vanilla git repo on https/ssh. Gitlab seems as it is a turnkey product, repo hosted internally. It was certainly very easy to import our existing projects into it.
May I ask what the reason is you don't want to host the repo's in GitLab itself?
I think your issue lies elsewhere, not on the packaging scheme.
Sometimes, in a lab, it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
I resent the way things went down, such as removing people's repositories, and paying gitorious developers to shut down the project. Those are history now, and I can't say they prevents anyone (anyone paying attention, that is) from taking a different route - fortunately, both projects are freely licensed and data is in git repositories.
They raise questions about the future though: next time people's code would be also removed? Will there be at least three months then, or less?
Why exactly doesn't Gitlab move freely licensed projects?
Since it bought the gitorious.org site, it's like you have two hosting sites, and want to close one down. For freely-licensed projects, making a copy is easy (whether people use it or not) - if Gitlab wanted to.
We don't move projects because we don't want to move them to a new organization and url without explicit consent. We're working with archive.org to make sure nothing is lost.
Destroying what might be the only public repository of some projects, and breaking a ton of existing links, is not something that sounds good.
Edit: I updated the size, it was not 12TB but 4.5
It would be awesome if an other individual or organization is willing to sponsor the hosting costs so we could keep it open longer, if so please email me at sytse@gitlab.com or comment here.
GitLab bought Gitorious so they could shut it down, not so they could give it to someone else. That is the purpose of acquisitions within the same field.
That's a pretty disingenuous thing to say when it seems like the only reason an "upgrade path" is needed in the first place is because of the acquisition and shutdown.
Edit: Even with Gitorious being "no longer sustainable" in its current form, there are other methods that could have been used (price adjustments, fundraising, etc) rather than an outright and very short-term shutdown.
For now you'll have to install from source https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...
More about the memory requirements can be found in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/doc/inst...
Gogs works though.