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Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

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Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#11

Post by kogepathic »

FBISurveillance wrote: post #3
Dunedan wrote: post #2

I can't help to think that Gitlab is more and more eating Github's lunch. I wonder why we see so little from Github to get out of that situation.

While I'm glad to see competition gearing up, I don't think GitHub and GitLab are in the same ballpark yet. While I'm a big fan of their team and culture approach, we yet to see better/respected GitLab.com SLA guarantees — it still feels like they're doing too much "testing on production".

> While I'm a big fan of their team and culture approach, we yet to see better/respected GitLab.com SLA guarantees — it still feels like they're doing too much "testing on production".

Agreed. However, if you need more reliability than gitlab.com it's not difficult to host GitLab yourself in a VM or on bare metal.

Many companies already have their own physical servers in a DC (either colocated or leasing). Hopefully the people managing these servers know what they're doing and can give the developers a good SLA. Although some additional work on file/DB syncing would be necessary to have a hot spare.

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#12

Post by jlgaddis »

mathw wrote: post #9

I don't actually understand this. Are they referring to the agreements for contributing to GitLab itself, or for contributing to things hosted on GitLab, which surely have nothing to do with the hosting at all?

Yeah, I'm not sure what they mean by "migrate their communities".

I'm not exactly real clear on "... and open source projects" either. Debian used to use Alioth [0] pretty extensively. Maybe they're getting rid of that and moving everything that was on there to GitLab.

I get that this is a press release but it could be a bit more informative, IMO.

[0]: https://wiki.debian.org/Alioth

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#13

Post by bayindirh »

kogepathic wrote: post #11
FBISurveillance wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I'm glad to see competition gearing up, I don't think GitHub and GitLab are in the same ballpark yet. While I'm a big fan of their team and culture approach, we yet to see better/respected GitLab.com SLA guarantees — it still feels like they're doing too much "testing on production".

> While I'm a big fan of their team and culture approach, we yet to see better/respected GitLab.com SLA guarantees — it still feels like they're doing too much "testing on production". Agreed. However, if you need more reliability than gitlab.com it's not difficult to host GitLab yourself in a VM or on bare metal. Many companies already have their own physical servers in a DC (either colocated or leasing). Hopefully…

GitLab on hosted hardware works great. I maintain two different instances. One of them automatically updates itself, and it just works.

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#14

Post by detaro »

mathw wrote: post #9

I don't actually understand this. Are they referring to the agreements for contributing to GitLab itself, or for contributing to things hosted on GitLab, which surely have nothing to do with the hosting at all?

Contributing to GitLab itself.

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#16

Post by jlgaddis »

glutamate wrote: post #10

> GitLab, a software product used by 2/3 of all enterprises, ... This claim is false. The linked survey shows that GitLab has a 2/3 market share in self-hosted Git providers. Not every enterprise self-hosts a git repository.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good press release!? /s

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#18

Post by bayindirh »

mathw wrote: post #9

I don't actually understand this. Are they referring to the agreements for contributing to GitLab itself, or for contributing to things hosted on GitLab, which surely have nothing to do with the hosting at all?

I think they will migrate the systems which they host VCSes. Since they may need to make changes in the code to suit them, abandoning the legal stuff makes using, modifying and contributing back stuff easier.

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#19

Post by knocte »

lukaslalinsky wrote: post #4
Dunedan wrote: post #2

I can't help to think that Gitlab is more and more eating Github's lunch. I wonder why we see so little from Github to get out of that situation.

GitLab being open source and easy to run on your own hardware is a huge "selling" point. I don't think it's helping their income much, but it's growing the community of users and the money will probably come later. It's very hard for GitHub to compete with that. GitHub could introduce CI and other things that GitLab has, but it would be just one extra feature you have to pay for.

> I don't think it's helping their income much

Being opensource is not normally an aspect that helps the income, actually the other way around. Opensource is the argument that wins for the customers that appreciate lack of vendor-lock-in.

Re: Debian and GNOME announce plans to migrate communities to GitLab

#20

Post by ufo »

mathw wrote: post #9

I don't actually understand this. Are they referring to the agreements for contributing to GitLab itself, or for contributing to things hosted on GitLab, which surely have nothing to do with the hosting at all?

GNOME and Debian wanted to replace some of their infrastructure with Gitlab but before they did that they asked Gitlab to get rid of their CLA. Before this announcement, people contributing to gitlab itself effectively gave full control of copyrights to gitlab but from now on contributors will keep full control of the copyrights for what they contribute.

GNOME and Debian are very serious about free software and are wary of using software with CLAs because at any moment the company can switch future versions of the project to a non-free license, without input from the community and despite the software containing code originaly from the community.

I wouldn't expect Gitlab to do something stupid like this today but getting rid of the CLA protects the free software community from Gitlab doing stupid things in the future. For example, if they end up being acquired by Oracle or some other FOSS-sabotaging company.

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