There is absolutely no denying that GitHub has done a lot of good for the world, but at the same time I feel that because of their true open source foundation GitLab really listens to their community much better. On a related note, many devs are just now discovering that with GitLab you can have unlimited private or public repos hosted at GitLab.com for free. Already a number of prominent projects have made the jump for this reason alone. You can find the nascent but growing list of publicly listed projects here: <a href="https://gitlab.com/explore" rel="nofollow">https://gitlab.com/explore</a><p>In the end, strong competition is good for users and projects and the Git ecosystem will only continue to grow and benefit from it; may the friendly rivalry continue.
From the article: <i>"I wrote "your data is accessible", but actually I should rather write "your data is currently accessible". Theoretically, nothing prevents GitHub from removing programmatic access to parts of the data they host."</i><p>Do their terms of service permit them to do that? Unfortunately, yes: <i>"GitHub reserves the right at any time to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, your access to the API (or any part thereof) with or without notice. ... GitHub, in its sole discretion, has the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any and all current or future use of the Service, or any other GitHub service, for any reason at any time. Such termination of the Service will result in the deactivation or deletion of your Account or your access to your Account, and the forfeiture and relinquishment of all Content in your Account. GitHub reserves the right to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time. In the event that GitHub takes action to suspend or terminate an account, we will make a reasonable effort to provide the affected account owner with a copy of their account contents upon request, unless the account was suspended or terminated due to unlawful conduct."</i><p>That's a problem. A management change at Github could have a big effect on open source software. This isn't a theoretical issue; Google Code was shut down, and Sourceforge turned to the dark side and started bundling adware with downloads.<p>It would be useful if a nonprofit such as the Internet Archive or the Wikimedia Foundation mirrored Github periodically. Just in case Github management got uppity.
"github-backup [...] backs up everything GitHub publishes about the repository, including branches, tags, other forks, issues, comments, wikis, milestones, pull requests, watchers, and stars."<p><a href="https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/joeyh/github-backup</a>
"A competitor willing to make it easy for GitHub project maintainers to migrate to their services could actually make use of GitHub APIs and provide an automated migration system."<p>This is what we did at GitLab, you can import multiple projects with repos, wikis, issues and pull requests in one go.
Most articles bashing/unbashing github always forget what to me is the real point. The problem is not in the git part of GitHub.<p>GitHub is a social network: star, fork, comment, popularity. The fact that some devs would see github as the only place to be to get to make their contributions "public" it is acting more as a social network and less about a git hosting tool. That's the real lock-in.<p>That's also GitHub's value. It is the largest social network of developers.
One thing I'm missing in the whole gitlab/github hosted discussion is how big is the chance that gitlab will fail where github will succeed because github actually has a lot more income because they charge for the private repos?<p>In the longer term this may be a deciding factor, but if enough people that right now pay for github move to gitlab the balance will shift to the point where gitlab won't be able to deal with the amount of free users and gitlab will fail because they no longer have enough paying users...<p>It's hard to compete with free, but it is also hard to <i>sustain</i> free.
"Vendor Lock-in" is a meaningless phrase if you start applying it to GitHub. You're talking about competition. GitHub competes and people like it a lot. That's not a lock-in.<p>Your business won't end if you switch to bitbucket. A developer might grump at you for a day. Big deal.<p>Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etc. They're the ones with a lock-in. They could go into a corporate coma and money would still print itself and climb into their pockets for the next 20-years.
I've started hosting some really small projects with Microsoft's Visual Studio Online ("Team Services" now). It's surprising what you get for free.<p><a href="https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services-pricing-vs" rel="nofollow">https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv...</a><p>Work's blessed me with an MSDN Enterprise subscription, so I get some extra bells and whistles. Discounting the extras, it's a hosted version of TFS for free (for five developers + unlimited "stakeholders"). Which is great if you have bug bears about GitHub's issue tracking.<p><a href="https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs" rel="nofollow">https://www.visualstudio.com/features/agiletools-vs</a><p>It's not going to replace GitHub for me, yet. I think Microsoft said it themselves when they started hosting projects on GitHub instead of Codeplex: "GitHub is where the community is."<p>EDIT: I should say, VSO/VSTS is really focused towards .NET development. It has some special Java support, too, and beyond that it's general purpose enough to work with other languages.
> GitHub is, in my opinion, an "ethical" proprietary software company, if such thing can exist<p>If that were true, they would not have embarked upon a Thought Police crusade like this one:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9966118</a>
"Github threatens to shut down a repository for using the word 'retard'"
Lock-in or not, it's hard to see what is compelling about GitHub in the first place. I agree with Torvalds that pull request are a horrible and bureaucratic way of submitting patches.<p>Possibly that is what people like about GitHub: Leave an audit trail of your activities, do a lot of doc fixes to have better statistics...<p>Perhaps the following quote of pg also applies to GitHub:<p>"Object-oriented programming generates a lot of what looks like work. Back in the days of fanfold, there was a type of programmer who would only put five or ten lines of code on a page, preceded by twenty lines of elaborately formatted comments. Object-oriented programming is like crack for these people: it lets you incorporate all this scaffolding right into your source code. Something that a Lisp hacker might handle by pushing a symbol onto a list becomes a whole file of classes and methods. So it is a good tool if you want to convince yourself, or someone else, that you are doing a lot of work."
I'm really surprised that Github hasn't done what Stackoverflow does, and advertise jobs. They have an awesome knowledge of the skills of their users up front.
I wish these anti-github blogs and fud would stop and people found better things to write about.<p>Github is fantastic.I love using it over anyone else.<p>GitLab and Bitbucket are good too. You can even host stuff yourself.<p>Its nice to have choice. Choose the one your like.I Choose github and that is my choice.
Happy to be locked in to github. There is a tipping point where value gained exceeds the risk of vendor lockin, and in my case there is no question the benefits outweight the risk.
With the risk of sounding overly critical, I really can't understand why people get so emotional about software. Github isn't a public utility company and so isn't obliged to provide free services to anyone or cater specifically to the needs of one group of users, if they do so it is by their own choice and because it helps them to fulfill their monetary goals (making money is the main purpose of a for-profit company). Also, I can't see any significant lock-in effects at work here.<p>Personally, I have several dozens software projects: Some of them are on Github, some on Bitbucket, some run on a custom Gitlab instance and some are plain git repositories on some Linux server. I think we have more choices for hosting code projects today than we had ever before, it's just that like in many other markets there is a power law at work which makes that one player has 90 % market share, this doesn't automatically mean that the largest player has a monopoly on source code hosting though.<p>As the author says, the fact that the software Github provides is affordable, convenient and works very well is probably the only lock-in there is, and this kind of quality-based lock-in is actually desirable in my opinion. What would not be acceptable to me is a lock-in based on the fact that your data is stored somewhere from where it's very hard/impossible to get out (SAP comes to mind), this isn't the case for Github though.