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Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

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Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#31
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be right, but there are already many products out there that have been violating that trademark policy for quite some time, e.g. GitLab, GitKraken, SmartGit, ... My guess is that Software Freedom Conservancy (a nonprofit) has more important things to do than go after those projects for trademark policy violations.

Some of those were specifically grandfathered in to the policy [0]: > Careful readers among you may now be wondering about GitHub, GitLab, Gitolite, etc. And now we get back to why it took over a year to get the trademark granted. > The USPTO initially rejected our application as confusingly similar to the existing trademark on GitHub, which was filed in 2008. While one might imagine where the "Git" in GitHub comes f…

Seems weird to still go for that policy knowing that GitHub would be immune to it. I get wanting to defend the trademark but once the cat is out of the bag (which in this case means GitHub's name being immune to said trademark), it just ends up leading to a pretty unfair market advantage for them no?

I'm sure their reasoning makes sense and that this has been taken into consideration by the git project at the time though, so I'll have to look into it!

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#32
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been using Gitness to develop Gitness for the last 6 months. We do mirror on GitHub as a backup. But we also want to meet the community where they exist today, which is GitHub.

Could you provide some sort of status report about what Gitness actually is? According to the Git repo it looks like it started Feb 2, 2014, and Brad Rydzewski did the vast majority of the work on the project (e.g., 100x more than anybody else), and is still involved now. I downloaded it and tried it out (which is VERY easy to do), and the actual software seems to be a Typescript frontend and Go backend, with Monaco…

Gitness brings code hosting and pipeline execution together. It builds on top of the Drone continuous integration system, which Harness acquired. Brad was directly involved, but this time he had the help of 12 full time developers

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#33
post #19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that they used GitHub during the development of Gitness. It would be a bit risky to build your new git competitor inside itself, surely?

It's also kinda a hallmark of a mature computer anything to use itself in some way. You bootstrap your compiler using another until you can self compile. You write a build tool plugin which uses an older version of itself to enhance its own build. Intel probably uses intel chips to design future intel chips. It happens all the time and aesthetically computer nerds are drawn to this type of beauty.

From elsewhere in the thread:

> We have been using Gitness to develop Gitness for the last 6 months. We do mirror on GitHub as a backup. But we also want to meet the community where they exist today, which is GitHub.

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#34
post #20

So here's the GitHub project: https://github.com/harness/gitness How does the project already have 27k stars? Surely this was not public before? Or do you think drone always had this product?

We felt like bringing CI and SCM together was a natural evolution for the project. It is something Brad, the creator of Drone, always envisioned. Harness and its Founder, Jyoti, shared the vision and made a big investment in making this happen. It is awesome to see this breathe new life into a great open source project

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#35
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have been using Gitness to develop Gitness for the last 6 months. We do mirror on GitHub as a backup. But we also want to meet the community where they exist today, which is GitHub.

If you don't mind me asking since you're here: will you be implementing ForgeFed in Gitness [0]? My sense is that federation is our best hope for breaking GitHub's network effects, and I'd love to see more projects like yours join the protocol. [0] https://forgefed.org/

Thank you for the suggestion. We will look into it.

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#36
post #5

> There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it Seems odd that he wouldn’t know about Sourcehut (2018) and Gitea (2016).

Mind you I use (and thus pay for) Sourcehut: the vast majority of folks won't be cross shopping Sourcehut and GitHub. As it stands now the UX is (to put it charitably) bad. There's a lot to like, but overall Sourcehut is disjointed rather than cohesive. The workflow itself is also an acquired taste. With a bit of spit and polish Sourcehut could be quite nice to use, but it's not there yet. Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

The others mentioned are more or less knockoffs of GitHub, because at one point GitHub was quite worth emulating.

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#38

Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor which hosts their open-source code...on GitHub... with a prominent call to arms on their landing page to star their repository...on GitHub... If you don't even use your own product why should anyone else use it?

Reminds of the GitHub issue for hosting Gitea on Gitea, it's... a read to be sure: https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/1029

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#39
post #4

How does this compare to e.g. Forgejo, Gitea, Gogs, self-hosted GitLab, or other alternatives? Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions). While the Pipelines UI looks nice, it hides all the ve…

> Forgejo in particular has self-hosted actions runners that can be registered offline, and the runners themselves can be given labels and execute most existing GitHub actions (in fact, the yaml format they use is intentionally meant to be compatible with GitHub actions).

This is also part of Gitea. Which makes since because Forgejo is a soft-fork of Gitea.

Re: Harness launches Gitness, an open-source GitHub competitor

#40
post #5

> There hasn’t been a new Git repo launch in almost a decade,” Bansal told me. “Now you have GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket from Atlassian, but that’s really it Seems odd that he wouldn’t know about Sourcehut (2018) and Gitea (2016).

Mind you I use (and thus pay for) Sourcehut: the vast majority of folks won't be cross shopping Sourcehut and GitHub. As it stands now the UX is (to put it charitably) bad. There's a lot to like, but overall Sourcehut is disjointed rather than cohesive. The workflow itself is also an acquired taste. With a bit of spit and polish Sourcehut could be quite nice to use, but it's not there yet. Hell, I bet Drew could pick…

> Hell, I bet Drew could pick up some of the UX folks that GitHub laid off.

Drew would never.

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