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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

#11
> That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness.

Wouldn’t this violate the git trademark policy?

https://git-scm.com/about/trademark

From that link:

>> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a third-party product or service without Conservancy's written permission. For the avoidance of doubt, this provision applies even to third-party marks that use the Marks as a syllable or as part of a portmanteau to refer to a product or service's use of Git code.

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

#13

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?

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?

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

#14
post #11

> That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness. Wouldn’t this violate the git trademark policy? https://git-scm.com/about/trademark From that link: >> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a th…

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.

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

#15
post #14
post #11

> That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness. Wouldn’t this violate the git trademark policy? https://git-scm.com/about/trademark From that link: >> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a th…

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.

[deleted]

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

#16
post #14
post #11

> That’s changing today with the launch of the Gitness open-source Git repository and the Harness Code Repository, the hosted and managed version of Gitness. Wouldn’t this violate the git trademark policy? https://git-scm.com/about/trademark From that link: >> In addition, you may not use any of the Marks as a syllable in a new word or as part of a portmanteau (e.g., "Gitalicious", "Gitpedia") used as a mark for a th…

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 from, by the time we applied to the USPTO, both marks had been widely used in parallel for years. So we worked out an agreement with GitHub which basically says "we are mutually OK with the other trademark existing".

> So GitHub is essentially outside the scope of the trademark policy, due to the history. We also decided to explicitly grandfather some major projects that were using similar portmanteaus, but which had generally been good citizens of the Git ecosystem (building on Git in a useful way, not breaking compatibility). Those include GitLab, JGit, libgit2, and some others. The reasoning was generally that it would be a big pain for those projects, which have established their own brands, to have to switch names. It's hard to hold them responsible for picking a name that violated a policy that didn't yet exist.

[0] https://public-inbox.org/git/20170202022655.2jwvudhvo4hmueaw...

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

#17
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).

And Codeberg (2019), which was based on Gitea until they forked it into Forgejo (2022).

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

#18
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…

Harness actually came from the opposite direction where they started out with CD, bought a CI comment (drone.io if memory serves) and are now introducing git hosting. So it's likely CI/CD is better than the git hosting

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

#19
post #13

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?

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.

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