I love gitlab and its features, and will commit to actually using it once dockerhub has gitlab integration. I agree though that is more of a limitation on dockerhub.
Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
271–280 of 325 posts
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#272I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…
I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspe…
> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub
I completely disagree, here a little story
before 2005 I was hosting my own SVN repos, then came a community "we host your open source project for free" and I moved my sources there
and it closed, so I moved all my repos (they kept growing) to google code
my main reason to move to google code was "its' google they will never close down"
guess what? few years later, google code close down
at that point I decided NERVER EVER AGAIN, I moved all my repos to my own private dedicated server
now I do use Github but as a mirror, they can close down tomorrow I don't care (note: I don't wish them that)
Some people take their repositories very seriously, hobbyist or not, for me it's like backup you only see how important the infrastructure is when the shit hits the fan.
Things like Github, Gitlab, etc. are nice but it's merely a beautiful web UI on top of what is important: the repository.
My point is even if you are an hobbyist you should own and control your repository, if you can host it on a dedicated server, or at home on a spare box, whatever, do it, do own it (the infra), yes because a tarball archive of your repo and a JSON export of your issues is completely useless.
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#273I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Then they started charging for enterprise features and turned it into a business, which felt even weirder. And then they raised a lot of money, which kind of made them seem more legitimate. And now this…
> I still don't know how I feel about GitLab. My initial reaction was that they were an underhanded, cheap knockoff of GitHub. It felt kind of dirty, like they were stealing GitHub's thunder and giving it away for free. Seems like they were just following in the footsteps of one of Open Source's great prophets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman#Events_leadin...
Richard Stallman is the "prophet" of free software. The EE license is not a free software license (and probably isn't an open source one either). The given license doesn't give you any of the four essential freedoms.
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you comment more on why a hobbyist should not need their own repo? If I'm doing SaaS for everything, my monthly costs start to go up. I've found it is far cheaper, and far (way!) more educational to take an extra box out of the basement and install Ubuntu/GitLab/Node/Java/Apache/Etc. I have to pay for internet either way, and the electricity cost is nowhere near the cost of having multiple Saas?
Most of the time, it's because of opportunity cost: The time you're spending building a server, learning how to manage repos, setting up redundancy and just trying to get the thing working, you could've spent on whatever product you were trying to produce, and would likely be much further along with if you hadn't done everything the hard way. That's not to say there isn't educational value, but a common piece of advi…
what's the cost of freedom and independence ?
I'm personally glad to have done things the hard way, sure it took some time to learn but learning sysadmin made me a better developer.
To me, setting up a repository, an issue tracker, a wiki etc. was more about learning about a process than learning "how to make it work on the server".
Process as "how to organise the production of writing software" and this is imho extremely important, I reuse what I learned all the time from web app to mobile app to server backend etc.
Simply put, I see a lot of people who fail to deal with software production simply because they just use the tool "a la mode" like Github, but are completely oblivious to the benefits of using semantic versioning, an issue tracker, a wiki for documentation, etc.
When you learn all that by yourself, you can compare different tools and have a feel for what's a "bare minimum", you just know how to manage/organise a project a make it work in production.
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#275While I've always admired GitLab being a free software alternative to GitHub, the whole EE licensing stuff really rubs me the wrong way. EE is completely proprietary software, even for people who have paid for it (it only allows the freedom to modify the code, but you cannot run it as you wish or distribute code freely). I understand charging money for your software, but you can also charge for feature requests and support. There's no need to lock away features from people using your free software just because you've deemed that feature "not useful for you" or "pay-to-use".
What I really don't get is the argument that "we won't liberate feature XYZ from EE because it's only useful for companies with 100+ developers". I think it's quite impressive that you can know what every user of your free software needs, and that you'll protect them from code only suited for enterprise.
I'll still use GitLab (the fact there's a free software version is great), and I'll be the first to fork (or back someone else's fork) CE as soon as you get acquired and your free software is no longer maintained by you (see: Oracle with Solaris, and every other acquahire ever).
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you are right about how GitLab started. There is, and there should be, a lot of frustration about the biggest open source hub (GitHub) not being open-source themselves. This feels backwards and creates a harsh dictatorship that shouldn't be. GitLab tried to solve that by making an open source version and because it now can be improved upon by everybody new features start to appear. I love the self hosted aspe…
> A hobbyist should not need to host their own repo, they should be able to rely on their SaaS. I would love it if GitLab.com could be rock stable like GitHub I completely disagree, here a little story before 2005 I was hosting my own SVN repos, then came a community "we host your open source project for free" and I moved my sources there and it closed, so I moved all my repos (they kept growing) to google code my ma…
> you should own and control your repository
Doesn't every distributed system let you keep your own repo under your control? I have all my projects on github but if github disappeared tomorrow I'd just push my repos to a different service.
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for building Trident! Happy customer here. Gitlab servers work really well and is super fast. Patiently waiting for the Github servers functionallity to be on par with the Gitlab one :)
Appreciate this compliment :) Please open any issues you see with the App in the issue tracker, helps me prioritise new features and candid feedback helps!
Already opened some enhancement request on the issue tracker, thanks! Any help you need :)
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
The opportunity cost on the front side is often worth it but the long term benefit on the back side is you aren't dependent on that SaaS, are running stuff you know something about and have a lot of flexibility. I'm from the old school, I use SaaS/PaaS mostly for stuff I know is painful to do yourself (sometimes file storage, nearly always email) but the rest lives on vanilla boxes configured with ansible (frankly an…
Can you suggest a good way to get started with Ansible?
I just installed Ansible on a workstation and started playing with it to configure a server (the server only needs SSH). Or, use this guide:
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also, do they pride themselves for writing this in PHP? I consider this an anti-feature, but this might be highly opinionated. I'd prefer it to be written in something else, too, but - the Phacility team are ex-Facebook developers. If anyone knows how to use PHP, it's them. They built their own, extensive web application framework on top of it (which is a remarkable achievement for itself). Phabricator is one of th…
I'm primarily a Ruby developer, but my current gig has me working exclusively in PHP (and worse yet, Wordpress). PHP as a language is actually pretty stellar these days. There are things about it that I dislike, but there has been a lot of recent work put in to improving the language. I'm always finding nice features. Really the place that PHP is lacking is on the tooling/ops side of the projects built on top of it.…
> A lot of what I have to work with still seems to be 15 years old.
Like what?
Re: Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
#280My company with ~300 developers are moving to Gitlab in the next few months. Today our CTO/PM shared opinion about Gitlab and he was very happy we're doing it, even better I recommended it to him :) I'm a Gitlab users for a few years now, personally I like it much more than Github, one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS, I also dislike their CoS. Go…
> one of the reason is that I fear that Github contains too many projects and gains too much control over OSS I don't understand this fear. All repositories on GitHub can be hosted elsewhere. Moving metadata (e.g. issues, milestones, PRs, etc.) is more difficult but mostly possible. Disclaimer: I like that GitHub is the "central" place for OSS, it makes my life much easier. I know how to use the product very well and…
>I don't understand this fear
Monopoly. Github enforces their CoC which has nothing do to with good coding practices or technological progress, they ban repositories and people based on their views expressed in comments.