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.
It is a very nice system, but the stuff that goes into a shutdown had me fighting to keep the message as tight as possible. I wanted to go on about Bitbucket, gitlab, and put in a long discussion about how this doesn't effect the scalable git team at google at all (we host android and chrome and a ton of internal teams on a git backed on our backends here) , but had to keep the message pure...
Wow dude, not only is using someone's quote on your website without consent pretty unclassy, using their employer to add legitimacy and make it seem like they're speaking on behalf of the company is just not ok at all.
Just to be clear, I asked the person that was quoted what he thought about it as I posted it and he seemed pretty relaxed https://twitter.com/sachinag/status/576145655120277504 but I still thought it was better to remove it.
Thanks for the honest answer! I know a lot of geeks wont agree with this, but the reality is when you are doing PR (or anything else, including/especially software engineering) you need to be as simple as possible.
Rather than recommending a specific Git hoster such as Github, you should have listed out alternatives... especially as Google Code also supports Subversion and Mercurial.
But, they wrote a Google Code to GitHub exporter tool. They felt the need to make a customer friendly egress tool, but not write a dozen of them. I think developers kinda know where they want to land already, and if they don't, they could do a google search, which would ultimately result in them using Github or Bitbucket, in all likelihood.
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.
Yes, good for customers to have a friendly exit path, but I'm sure Google are capable of writing a Google Code to AnyGitHostingCompany exporter tool :-)
There is also Kallithea (https://kallithea-scm.org/). Kallithea is a free and libre fork of RhodeCode after they dropped their GPLV3 license for parts of the codebase and added a paid user limit.
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
Apache Allura (http://allura.apache.org/) supports Subversion, Mercurial and Git. And it is the platform which powers SourceForge so you can run your own or use it at SF.
Kallithea is partly a fork of our old, legacy version of RhodeCode without all the hard work our engineers spent over the last 12 months in turning an open source project into a real, sophisticated enterprise product.
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.
> Kallithea is partly a fork of our old, legacy version of RhodeCode without all the hard work our engineers spent over the last 12 months in turning an open source project into a real, sophisticated enterprise product.
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:
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.
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.
I've used GitLab before as an enterprise type installation and it was okay but I had no idea you offered GitHub like hosting. When I visit your site it looks like there are no free options but Google Code was meant to house open source projects for free just like GitHub and BitBucket.
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!
It is the third link on the homepage, that says "Sign up for GitLab.com with unlimited free (private) repositories and collaborators.". But we're open to suggestions to make it more obvious. It is hard to communicate downloads and a saas.
I think that's because you are promoting the Gitlab Enterprise edition. It is very easy to miss the third blurb which promotes the free repos. Compare this to bitbucket.org front page (Free private repos are upfront). Github.com frontpage is not as clear but they don't need to
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.
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.
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.
Well for me personally I always head straight to the pricing page of any service I'm interested in and I didn't see any mention of the repository hosting you do there. Is that just for support / enterprise installations? Might be helpful to mention it there.
It is mentioned there but pretty low on the page, "Sign up for our free GitLab.com service if you want to use GitLab without installing it.". What do you think?
Thanks for the love furry! We're seeing more people switch, including many from Gitorious. We try to combine the advantages of a good interface and free repositories.
It's a ballsy and maybe foolishly ambitious motto, but in Gitlab's case they actually deliver on it -- which, considering the current monopolization of project hosting is quite a feat unto itself.
Thanks for the suggestion. The first question anyone asks us is how we compare with GitHub, so we figured we answered it right on the homepage. Awesome that you'll give it a spin, I hope you like it.
Wow, way to miss my point. Gitlab might be better. But when the best ___location on the frontpage is a direct swipe at the leading competitor, to me that reads as very weak. You know who doesn't bother to take jabs at their competitors? Winners.
I really don't think that blog post is the place to pitch code hosting websites. Github (and to a lesser degree bitbucket) are websites that are exactly in the space where Google Code and before that Sourceforge were.
I think it is fair to for GitLab to pitch their service, considering that the google code blogspot post specifically mentioned both GitHub 8 times and Bitbucket 3 times, while GitLab offers similar functionality. It would have been fairer for the blog to not-specifically endorse anything or post a link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source_code_soft...
> I think it is fair to for GitLab to pitch their service, considering that the google code blogspot post specifically mentioned both GitHub 8 times and Bitbucket 3 times, while GitLab offers similar functionality.
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?
"There are many other hosting services like gitlab, what would make gitlab different so that it would deserve a pitch there?"
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 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.
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.
Well if we're using "Responsiveness of the UI" as the metric, then I would argue that http://fossil-scm.org/ beats both GitLab and GitHub. Fossil is easily self hosted (just run one small executible file). And it is really fast, because it is written in C with sqlite and is simple and minimalistic. It is not git based, but is a simpler DVCS. Dynamically generated pages on my home computer take less than .001 ms to display. It has all the features most small developers need, with a builtin lightweight wiki, issue tracker, and code tree. Your self-hosted website is available even if you don't have an internet connection, or you can use free hosting service like http://chiselapp.com/. Of course it looses in terms of size of community. But popularity does not determine quality.
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.
> Well if we're using "Responsiveness of the UI" as the metric, then I would argue that http://fossil-scm.org/ beats both GitLab and GitHub.
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.
> "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.
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).
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.
> GitLab is faster in on some pages. The commit page probably is slower, but not by so much:
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.
Right now GitLab is hosted in Germany (AWS Frankfurt) and I was testing from the US (Mountain View). But I sometimes see the same delay you mention. We'll move it to the US east coast over the next couple of months.
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.
On GitLab I could not search for top repositories by programming language. For a beginner like me, it is very important. I could go to Github and search for top repositories in the language I am learning. I usually find top projects, try to figure out how they work, how a experienced dev does a specific stuff (compared to noob like me) and I ask myself how can I "copy" those traits and improve myself.
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.
Thanks these valid concerns. We would certainly like to improve the discover functionality in GitLab. Right now https://gitlab.com/explore is pretty limited. But the community is actively working on this. This month we introduced a commit calendar and I'm sure that it will improve further over the coming months.
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.
> What reasons do you have to you believe this statement? I'm curious.
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.
> Since you used the words, "absolutely no reason", here's a counterpoint: as part of an anti-censorship hydra effort.
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?
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
We did not move anybody. People imported their repo's themselves. Another project that moved is F-droid https://gitlab.com/u/fdroid that was before the acquisition.
Yes, we certainly strongly suggest it to people. Just wanted to make sure everyone understands that the move is initiated by people themselves, we didn't move anyone.
Obviously, they specifically closed it because everyone uses Github. I think the key selling point though for you guys, is not putting code on other peoples' servers at all, which is unlikely to be Google Code alums.
Thanks, people hosting their own servers currently are the majority of GitLab users. But we also want to be a valid hosted alternative with GitLab.com and we think free (private) repos with extensive functionality is a pretty sweet deal.
I think that GitLab should compete directly with GitHub in open source projects hosting area. Free open tier is powerful tools for letting more people know you.
And for the whole community's benefits, we need another choice other than GitHub.
