[skadge]

We are a ~70 engineers company in Spain, using on-prem Gitlab. One engineer in fully dedicated to the dev + maintenance of our CI/CD pipeline.

Due to a large & spread code base (~1000 repos) and rather complex testing and deployment needs (we sell research robots: many different platforms, each of them with customer customizations), Gitlab has been an excellent platform for us, that we can easily shape to the needs of our pipeline.

The dev experience is also great: pushing one tag essentially turns code in ready-to-install Debian packages in a test environment, followed by one additional click on a Gitlab pipeline to send the packages to production.

We could probably do that with github as well, but I would not underestimate the convenience of having the whole platform accessible and available at our fingertips.

TL;DR: we won't move to github any time soon :-)

[forty]

Our engineering team is based in Europe (mostly Paris). We do use self hosted Gitlab but we pay the Gitlab Ultimate license. I think Gitlab is indeed quite popular here, and smaller companies do use the CE edition until they feel they can afford the paid version.

Not implementing everything customers ask and focusing on supporting only one platform/forge and do it very well is very respectable, but I don't feel the explanation given by the author of the article is very convincing.