GitLab’s CEO reflects on GitHub’s move to offer free private repos

I'm starting to believe that Gitlab actually has marketing team dedicated to HN. Everytime there is a Gitlab HN post you would find random unrelated comments on why they prefer Gitlab over Github.

&gt; At the time, I was very disappointed to learn that BitBucket.org already offered the same. GitLab took off despite that and GitLab.com recently surpassed 10 million projects.<p>Is it just me, or does this sentence not make sense? I don&#x27;t know why this is disappointing to him, or why he would just be learning this now.

I like how GitHub has search on their front page while GitLab has some marketing page instead. Is it possible to search Gitlab without logging in? I used to host Gitlab for more private repos for many years but lately I have switched to Gogs because it is much simpler to maintain it and it has less bloat (and features).

He&#x27;s right that their value-add is the fully integrated devops cycle. That&#x27;s what&#x27;s been appealing to us with Gitlab (even though it is sometimes not as polished as other offerings). Having one SaaS subscription for most of your dev process needs as a startup is nice.

Atlassian Bitbucket [1] offer private repos too:<p>&gt; Free for small teams under 5 and priced to scale with Standard ($2&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo) or Premium ($5&#x2F;user&#x2F;mo) plans.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;product" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitbucket.org&#x2F;product</a>

This feels like a race to the bottom. Gitlab was so bold to launch unlimited free private repos. Feels like github made a weak move in response to market loss. It will be interesting to see what happens when Google or Amazon start promoting their git products.

Man, the GitLab astroturfing in HackerNews is getting annoying.

GitLab is awesome. There are a lot of features I use like the built in time tracking. Also, I&#x27;m not very interested in using GitHub since it was acquired by Microsoft since they have a littered history of abuse and vendor lock-in. I&#x27;m not sure how they will try to retrofit EEE onto Git, but I won&#x27;t be surprised when they somehow do.