Hi Chris, GitLab CEO here. What do you think about mentioning Gitlab.com as an alternative for people to move to? It has unlimited (private) projects and unlimited collaborators. It is based the open source GitLab project.
But I heartily recommend people look at Gitlab...
From a user action perspective, if you give a user who doesn't know what their options are too many options, they won't take action. They'll feel the need to explore all the different paths, and feel anxiety about making the right choice. I think giving users fewer things to think about is actually better a lot of the time.
Disclaimer: I am RhodeCode's co-founder.
Kallithea is being actively developed (a 0.2 release is coming soon) by a free software community under the auspices of the software freedom conservancy. See this blog post from Bradley Kuhn for more details: http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/07/15/why-kallithea.html
In more than 30,000 engineering hours our team added exclusive Subversion support, 4x better performance and tons of security fixes (all based on enterprise customer feedback), server-side-mergeable pull requests and maybe the world's most flexible and advanced code review system.
Anyway, I recommend to try out both and choose the one you trust your source code and team's productivity more.
P.S.: RhodeCode Enterprise 3 is free for startups and small teams.
The marketing-speak, it burns.
You turned your back on us. You lied. You and Marcin repeatedly told us that you were comitted to free software. I don't know if you lied to Marcin as well or if both of you knew that the GPL-ness of Rhodecode was going to disappear.
For a while you had an ambiguous licensing situation where you made it seem like Rhodecode was still somehow GPL'ed, but after a while you apparently tried to revoke permissions on everything. You even threatened with legal action someone who used the code under the GPL license you said you were allowing.
Oh, apparently you even went through with your legal threat:
https://github.com/moparisthebest/unlimit-code/blob/master/r...
And now you're talking about "engineers" and "enterprise" and "real" and "sophisticated".
bkuhn salvaged what he could without trying to get into the legalities of the GPL revoking you did (which the GPL itself forbids), but still I feel very betrayed by what you did with Rhodecode.
edit: more details of the debacle
Wow, there is someone really angry and offensive here and not really telling the truth ...
It is sad to see how often forks go downhill if they were purely based on ideologies and not with the user and general good for the project in mind.
But anyway, we welcome and fully support everyone to fork our old GPL versions, the world does not need less but more source code management systems, especially since we lost now one of the key players in Google Code.
As can be seen in my blog post and various talks in the subject, the Kallithea community faced two choices: a fork of only the GPLv3'd components, or a lengthy GPL enforcement battle with Rhodecode, who violated the GPL by changing to a non-Free-Software license for code that combined GPL'd software that wasn't copyrighted by Rhodecode.
If Rhodecode would go back to a pure GPLv3 model for its software and develop the software in pubic again, I think the fork could be easily resolved and we could all work together again. Thus, only one simple act of yours would resolve the fork entirely, sebastiank123, will you take that act?
Meanwhile, I'm sure the Free Software user community can make the easy and obvious choice between a community-run, developed-in-public Free Software project that complies with GPLv3 and a for-profit-corporate run, developed-in-private, semi-Open-Source project that has a history of GPLv3 compliance problems.
That you haven't yet is mindboggling.
(if you'll get in trouble for this please say so here or via sytse@gitlab.com and I'll remove it ASAP)
Do you have free hosting for open source? If not then I don't think it makes sense for them to mention your service.
Edit: As pointed out below GitLab.com actually has free public and private repository hosting. It took me a while to find it on the website. That's pretty cool!
Figured I'd find it on the home page or under pricing or something.
But beyond that I dunno.
I think what Gitlab.com needs is a template like this
- Free Private Repos - Host it on Gitlab.com
- Need to host it on your servers? Get our open source edition
- Need enterprise support/features? Get our enterprise edition and host it on your servers
Btw do you offer enterprise features on gitlab.com? It was not very clear
Also your pricing page needs to be clear about the different versions. There are at least 3 different Gitlab products (free gitlab.com, gitlab ce, gitlab ee) but the information is easy to miss.
In your homepage, the three blurbs (download and install.., pricing for spport.., signup for gitlab.com..) feel like 3 product features rather than 3 different products.
I've changed the homepage according to your feedback in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/3a09175f...
https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/ mentions that it runs the enterprise edition in the middle box
The pricing page is a hard one, we'll look into that.
Any idea how we can make the three blurbs on the homepage feel more like different products?
1. For the blurbs - remove the icons and add headers. Something like this - https://cloudup.com/cGSjRmrWGkU
2. Gitlab.com as a product name is very confusing. When I first checked out gitlab.com my thought was "I'm already on gitlab.com, what's this other gitlab.com" :) So I have changed it to Gitlab Hosted to make it more clear
Other Potential Improvements
This section - https://cloudup.com/c4vipl-QFBU tries to do everything. Explain features, introduce 3 different products and has a lot of text that could be removed
I would suggest making the entire block about features but in a layered way. i.e first introduce common features and then differentiate the products.
Some text could be removed - Subscriptions blurb can be replaced by "See our enterprise pricing page for subscriptions" or something similar. The way it is laid out now, it seems it is separate from Github Enterprise.
The current feature text blurb is too much text and too little text at the same time :) Too much because it is just long lines of text. Too little because none of your features are explained elegantly. There is also a "much more" syndrome :)
Just see - https://about.gitlab.com/features/ - Powerful Code review - "Merge requests with line-by-line comments, CI and issue tracker integrations and much more" with a giant image. Text doesn't say much and ends with an ambiguous "much more" and the image is intimidating unless you are familiar with Gitlab.
Compare that to Pull requests section of stash "https://www.atlassian.com/software/stash?utm_source=bitbucke...
Images are not much help but they help in avoiding a wall of text and all the sub features are explained
The actual experience of using Bitbucket is not that great but they are doing a good job of explaining features :). Github enterprise also does something similar.
I think you should also move "Better than Github" to a different section like say "Why use GitLab?" Having it right at the top seems very defensive and a bit distracting.
One last thing - Link to some interesting projects using Gitlab and make it easy to find. You can even link to Gitlab.org somewhere. Looking around a repo gives a better feel for the product.
We'll try to improve the rest too and track it in issue https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/issues/271
Thank you very much for your kind comments.
Github is really great for the social experience, but I've been debating switching over to GitLab for all of my development projects.
That's a bit disingenuous. GitLab purchased Gitorious--of course people are switching.
> “Gitlab is an excellent option….. not only more user friendly than Gitorious but also easier to install.”
Just say you're the best git host. Don't mention your competitor.
I'm going to go create an account on it now. Good luck, guys!
IMO not mentioning competitors and not providing a detailed comparison to competitors means that marketing is winning and the market is failing.
Kudos to gitlab for providing info which helps the market work. Opposite of petty! :)
GitLab is objectively better. They even list their reasons on the page.
If you disagree you could, you know, refute those points instead of dismissing the whole thing in a petty manner.
I don't think it is always bad to compare yourself, but it should always be based on facts. I think Wealthfront is a winner and they posted https://medium.com/@adamnash/broken-values-bottom-lines-3d55...
Gitlab is not.
The only thing similar between gitlab and github is that they do something with version control. Gitlab is not a place for open source projects.
The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github.
There are many other hosting services like gitlab, what would make gitlab different so that it would deserve a pitch there?
Bitbucket is also mentioned even though they don't have a lot of public projects.
GitLab is open source, has a great interface, many features (protected branches, git-annex support) and we offer unlimited (private) repositories on GitLab.com
What reasons do you have to you believe this statement? I'm curious.
> The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github.
Really? I'm surprised. I started coding a forum platform and I only amassed 3 stars. On my non-furry personas, I've capped out at about 13.
I don't think popularity in github projects is fairly distributed enough to use that as a refutation of the quality GitLab has to offer. It's a bigger bandwagon, sure, but that's all.
While a big bandwagon can be attractive (it is for me), I don't think it's fair to disqualify a competitor based on this metric alone.
Did you use it? Gitlab has barely any open source projects let alone developers on it. Say as much as you want, but for many open source projects community is a big deal.
Currently there is absolutely no reason to use Gitlab. Neither does it do things better than Github or Bitbucket in any way, nor does it have a larger community. It's "just" another github clone.
> Really? I'm surprised. I started coding a forum platform and I only amassed 3 stars. On my non-furry personas, I've capped out at about 13.
The second biggest project on gitlab has 36 stars: https://gitlab.com/explore/projects/starred
The 9th largest already has less than the 13 stars you mentioned on your personal project.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/05/to-get-off-russias-blacklis...
Since you used the words, "absolutely no reason", here's a counterpoint: as part of an anti-censorship hydra effort.
All X is Y.
At least one X is not Y.
^-- contradiction
I don't see how this is relevant at all? First of all github did not remove that content, it IP blocked it. Secondly what do you think that gitlab would do if they would be hit by this?
Do you think it's better for github to go down for Russia entirely? Imagine that would be your proposal for what gitlab should do. Then it would even stronger enforce that gitlab is not a place to go for an Open Source project.
Why should your project suffer and become unavailable because some other project violated Russian law?
Maybe "generally no reason" would be better?
I'll drink to that :)
> However so far I have not hear any non nebulous reasons why an Open Source project should be on gitlab.
Heh, that's okay. I'm not here to convince anyone of anything.
That's not a reason to use the hosted gitlab version, that might be a reason to self host gitlab.
If I find a bug in GitLab I can feasibly submit a patch for it.
Which is why I said the blogpost would be fairer to just post the wikipedia comparison link. I never said that gitlab should "deserve" a pitch on the blog. I did say it was fair for GitLab to pitch their services, as the CEO has done here, but that is different from "deserving" a pitch.
It is hard to objectively determine what is the better hosting, but based on people's individual preferences, they can subjectively decide for themselves, which the wikipedia article helps out by clearly explaining the differences. Everyone who uses google code knows about github anyway, but might not be aware that there are other services.
We saw gitorious, an entirely-opensource service, fail due to lack of revenue. And we've seen Google Code, an entirely-proprietary solution, fail. For those concerned about the longevity of their hosting setup, they may want a hosting provider that both has a steady source of income to help guarantee longevity and that is based significantly on opensource software (maybe for reasons of philosophical principle in that opensource development should use opensource infrastructure, or for pragmatic reasons such that they can always fork the hosting service code). GitLab fills this niche nicely, in that the community edition is based on fully open-source code, while the enterprise edition (that the their commercial service gitlab.com is based on) uses proprietary extensions.
"The projects with the most stars on gitlab s gitlab itself with 221 stars right now. Even the smallest nodejs project achieves that popularity on github."
The lack of stars on gitlab projects may simply be due to the first-mover advantage of github, but does not necessarily represent any fundamental deficiencies is the hosting service.
It's quite easy to tell actually. Responsiveness of the UI, featureset, availability, size of the community.
* Gitlab is measurably slower (it takes about 5 seconds to load the commit page of a project, compared to <1 for github) * Gitlab's lacking many features that github has (many filetypes cannot be previewed, lack of integrations, general inferior issue tracker, no search and much more) * Availability: github rarely goes down. Right now it tracks at 100% availability over the last month. * Size of community: there is really no discussion here.
Note: I'm not talking about commercial hosting, but about a place for Open Source projects. There is currently absolutely no objective reason to put a project on gitlab.
You will likely loose arguments on public forums if you make statements like "absolutely no objective reason to ..." because someone just needs one reason to disprove. Here goes: GitLab has a functioning interface for managing git projects and lets anyone selfhost the community edition. Therefore there is an objective reason to put a project on GitLab. QED.
Which is why I really don't think (and that was my original point) that a Google announcement of shutting down Google Code should act as some sort of advertisement for $code-hosting-site/project. Github and Bitbucket deserve the mention because those projects are well established.
According to Wikipedia article, GitHub and Bitbucket were established in 2008, and GitLab in sept 2011, making it ~3.5 years old and about half the age. Although the precise meaning of "well established" is vague, and while you could say that GitHub and Bitbucket are "more established" than GitLab, I would say GitLab is at least "sufficiently established" (i.e. at least sufficient enough to host projects with %99+ uptime). Quick searches reveal that GitHub is known to go down, with major ddos in Nov 2011 and 2 hours in March 2014, Bitbucket was down sometime 27th April 2014, GitLab.com went offline for a full 8 hours in July 2014. (Someone who cares further can do a more precise comparison of uptime). But they were all fixed quickly, still up, functioning, learning, and improving. While maybe your threshold for consideration an internet service to be "well established" is different from another person's threshold, your threshold is not necessarily more valid and cannot be determined without more specific criterion.
Based alone on the argument that "well established" services deserve mention, then that should mean services established before Github and Bitbucket that are still running reliably should be mentioned as well. But you have specifically said it's ok for github and bitbucket to deserve mention but not others.
> "I really don't think (and that was my original point) that a Google announcement of shutting down Google Code should act as some sort of advertisement for $code-hosting-site/project."
It should not. And as I pointed out clearly in my original comment which I will repeat for emphasis as it has been the core of my whole argument:
"google code blogspot post specifically mentioned both GitHub 8 times and Bitbucket 3 times"
While it was appropriate (and arguably a duty as benefactor) for google to post a link to https://code.google.com/p/support-tools/ containing their export tools to github and bitbucket and the sourceforge import, that reference only takes one sentence and doesn't even require the google blog post itself to specifically mention any services. Considering that a shutdown announcement is a serious matter, it should be kept brief and limited to only information relevant to shutdown. All those specific references could have been omitted and the shutdown announcement would still make sense. By specifically mentioning certain services multiple times, the writer of the blog post has opened the door to queries about mentioning alternative services specifically. Had he written in a neutral manner (either by only posting the Wikipedia link or not mentioning any services), then it would have been inappropriate for GitLab to query for a request to be mentioned.
GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:
wget https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/commits/master master.1 [ <=> ] 66.40K 382KB/s in 0.2s
wget https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq/commits/master master.2 100%[=====================>] 183.50K 662KB/s in 0.3s
Again, your milage may vary (cache) and I do agree that the commits page of GitHub feels faster most of the time.
GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).
There are less integrations than GitHub but I would not say there is a lack of them https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/tree/master/app/mode...
We think the issue tracker is good, working with labels can be improved but getting a milestone overview across projects is pretty sweet.
Availability of GitLab.com is over 99.9% at the moment http://status.gitlab.com/
Over 700 people have contributed to GitLab http://contributors.gitlab.com/
We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.
For the initial HTTP request maybe and if you're in the US. Gitlab is painfully slow when loaded from a European network connection and you factor in the time it takes to fetch all resources. Cached or uncached.
> GitLab doesn't have preview support for as many features as GitHub, but it has many other features GitHub doesn't have such as protected branches and git-annex support (version large binaries with git).
Neither of which are important for Open Source projects.
> We understand if people place open source projects on GitHub, they have way more registered users. But some people choose GitLab and their numbers are growing.
I think Gitlab is a reasonable website to use for commercial hosting; I just don't see it for Open Source software.
I think protected branches are really nice for open source projects too, although I agree that most contributions will come from forks. Right now no open source projects use Git Annex but that might change now that it becomes easier to use, probably it is really nice if you have an open source game with huge digital assets.
Speaking as a European, it would be nice if you could keep it performant over here too ;)
We think the east coast of the US is the best compromise considering our user base. Can't solve speed of light :/
On GitLab, if I stumble upon any repo I can't figure which language it uses. On GitHub it is very clear. It even shows percentage of programming language used.
Open Source helps in so much for learning about programming for a noob like me and GitLab no way does that as like GitHub. Thats the one reason I don't use GitLab much, though I have an account. And one more reason why GitHub shines over GitLab for open source projects.
I would love to see the option to move from Google code to GitLab.
And for the whole community's benefits, we need another choice other than GitHub.