Our company gives them money but the main thing is that we have a lot of small private projects that are more like prototypes and will never see the light of day. We are not permitted to open source them and probably wouldn't if we could because they'd be worthless to everyone but us. The pricing plans for additional private repos is pretty steep with github so we had to pay for a crappy repository hosting service to dump all of our second tier projects. GitLab would be pretty neat to allow us to store our second rate stuff on our own servers and the stuff we use every day on github.
The nearly 4B market cap public company I work at uses gitlab to host our internal repositories. It works really well for us, we get a lot of the benefits of github, but we have control.
I do understand that they need pay for their running cost, but to be completely honest, I don't think that they're running the business in a smart way.
When GitHub took off, they were not offering private repository at all. Instead, they added it in slowly when they can afford to do so. This is one of the reason why GitHub has now become the #1 platform for open source projects around the world.
GitLab is trying a different approach by focusing on offering repository hosting as service, but as time progresses and GitHub grows, this business model became less and less attractive. As a result of it, now days GitLab mainly attracts people who thinks GitHub isn't the right option for them, and that's not a big market. No matter how many cost they cut, if this remain unchanged, GitLab is already on it's dead bed (by that, I mean stop growing, not close for business).
GitHub is smart because at very beginning (before allowing private repositories), they knew that if they want to attract good programmers and projects, they must also accept and respect garbage, because that's what it takes to build their trust.
Deleting user data however, always destroy trust. If storing those repositories creates unbearable cost for GitLab, then maybe introduce a reasonable cap and then rejects new commits once the cap is exceeded (while asking user to buy more spaces). Making the entire repository just disappear is too much.
I'm glad that they did not end up choosing that route, but at the same time, not choosing that route should be the default, not something you just realized after it went to the media.
Most businesses prioritize what people pay them for (or they run out of money). Gitlab is accumulating enterprise features because enterprises are paying them for those features. Most places I've worked have used GitHub and it's good enough. Some also had Gitlab for "secret" stuff but if you trust GitHub with your main code then you already trust them with a lot so might as well just use them for all code hosting.
It has the great advantage of being a company you can pay to fix problems. I don't know who you can pay to implement some custom git system for handling huge files and repos. GitHub/Atlassian/GitLab are not interested in working on your company specific workflow.
GitHub is great for open source projects, but it sucks for private repositories:
* No private repo in the free plan
* Pricing per repo in the paid plan - probably fine for a startup with just a couple products, unusable for a service company that starts a new project every month
So if you care about private repos, BitBucket vs GitLab is interesting.
Actually, gitlab is open source and the majority of the features aren't pay walled off. You can self host ~70% of the gitlab features on your own hardware, without paying a dime. Or you can self host and pay a subscription to enable all the enterprise features. At work, we use this for code which is too sensitive to host outside of our infrastructure. Closed source development needs management too.
For all of my personal projects I use GitLab. It has about the same amount of features as GitHub (more in many areas, in fact) and it's free for most usage, even private.
GitLab and BitBucket are going to eat GitHub's lunch if they don't change this crazy pricing model.
First of all, open source versions often are just not as good. I was a fan of gitlab for personal projects, but after trying it for a couple of months on a company's project, we moved back to github because of all the bugs and low perfomance.
We use GitLab at work, and while it works great for hosting internal stuff, any open source projects I'm still going to put on GitHub.
GitHub has the community, and I'd personally not like to see that divided, not to mention the interface is just so much easier to use - GitLab's is mildly infuriating.
I think GitLab somehow acts like this: they have a fully open source product, that you could host yourself for free, then you have a lot of extra functionality that works only for paying users. (tho I'm not sure how that works, if you have access to the code or not etc)
I think this is a nice article and I will take a peek at GitLab. I have to say the following though: I have been very annoyed with the difficulty in creating private repos in GitHub BUT I think it is a brilliant plan to encourage people to make their code available. As much as GitHub's pay-for-private-repos approach annoys me, I think if they hadn't done that, 30% or more of what's available on GitHub would be hidden. People made and make their code public because they have to pay not to. Brilliant, and the right approach for GitHub.
For the record, I think GitLab is awesome :) There's a ton of amazing reasons for large companies to use GitLab (storing your own data, customization, etc) that I completely stand by.
My umbrage is simply with the price argument Gogs lead with; it'll always end up cheaper to use GitHub (or another hosted solution) than to run your own.
We've got a FOSS project, use hosting and support services to pay staff to write MIT and GPL code. But because our model is nearly identical to GitLab model we cannot get the GitLab FOSS blessing. Is this irony?
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