GitLab acquires Gitorious

Sad news. I moved all of my repos from GitHub to Gitorious in order to get away from proprietary software, and now I'm (almost) back at square one. The public GitLab instance at gitlab.com runs the proprietary version, so I cannot move my repos there.

I like GitLab more than Gitorious on a purely technical level, but GitLab unfortunately has a CLA[0] and uses the MIT expat license, whereas Gitorious used the AGPL.

I guess I will just self-host my own GitLab CE instance now.

[0] http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html

I'm sorry to hear this. For the reasons of running a proprietary version please see my other answer in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559

We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. But your article looks interesting and I'll read it.

Great to hear you plan to run GitLab CE, we hope you'll enjoy it.

If you're looking at self-hosting, check out Phabricator. I've tried GitLab several times before, and maybe it's improved, but I was blown away by phabricator's features.

The install could use a bit of work, and setting up the repo hosting was somewhat tricky to understand the documents (various users and sudo lines to create). But overall it's pretty fantastic.

http://phabricator.org/

> I moved all of my repos from GitHub to Gitorious in order to get away from proprietary software

> I guess I will just self-host my own GitLab CE instance now.

I moved from Google Code to a forked version of indefero[1]. I would be happy to post the link but I don't want to be a shameless post. Indefero itself actually has some problems that I fixed (such as a scale problem), but otherwise it's pretty stable. I have over 100 projects in my instance and it's working really well.

I used Rhodecode for awhile before they sold out - and while it was nice looking - it seemed like every new version introduced a new bug or issue. It was also a pain upgrading.

A lot of people dislike google code because it doesn't have the "social" aspects of pull requests - but the pull requests I've offered have not been pulled or the author of the project wanted to keep requesting modifications that it just wasn't worth my time. The later was actually an important fix because his project was just completely broken...

I like google code because it's just simple no frills. Uploads/wikis/source all right there.

[1] - http://projects.ceondo.com/p/indefero/

Plenty of alternatives available. One for the gophers: http://gogs.io/

GitLab CEO here, I would love to discuss what people think about this and any questions please have about moving their code.

I expect a few projects won't migrate to gitlab.com from gitorious due to strong commitment to http://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

There is an opening for someone to provide gratis gitlab CE or other exclusively free software based git hosting.

I build and admin a public RPM repo for our product. After installing gitlab's RPM, I was blown away. I have never seen a single RPM that large work that perfectly on the first shot. Either I am lucky, or more likely, you really put a lot of effort into your packaging. Cheers to you for a brilliant demo.

It didn't quite fit into our workflow - I think we would like to use gitlab as a beautiful web client, but then push our code there back into our own vanilla git repo on https/ssh. Gitlab seems as it is a turnkey product, repo hosted internally. It was certainly very easy to import our existing projects into it.

First I want to thank you and the developers for your work on GitLab. Currently GitLab's binary packages are distributed as a big rpm/deb with every package needed by GitLab (like PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx etc.) inside it, and there are no official repositories, so one must manually download and install the Big package. Why can't we use the more traditional way with package dependencies?

Thank you for coming forward in many discussions (not only HN), and giving time for people's questions.

I resent the way things went down, such as removing people's repositories, and paying gitorious developers to shut down the project. Those are history now, and I can't say they prevents anyone (anyone paying attention, that is) from taking a different route - fortunately, both projects are freely licensed and data is in git repositories.

They raise questions about the future though: next time people's code would be also removed? Will there be at least three months then, or less?

Why exactly doesn't Gitlab move freely licensed projects?

Since it bought the gitorious.org site, it's like you have two hosting sites, and want to close one down. For freely-licensed projects, making a copy is easy (whether people use it or not) - if Gitlab wanted to.

How do you think this will affect major users/projects, e.g. Qt, on Gitorious? How much will their workflow have to change?

I think that the free/open source community lost one of the few places to do free/open source hosting. :-/

Not really related to the acquisition, but what's the status on running GitLab on the arm architecture such as the Raspberry Pi? I'd love to run that.

Deleted - I was confused. Thought it was GitHub buying gitlab to extinguish the competition.

Kallithea[1] is a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. It is written in Python and has an active mailing list. It supports both Mercurial and Git.

https://kallithea-scm.org/

For a collection of GitHub alternatives (broadly speaking), including Kallithea, you can consult this list:

http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives

To add come context, it is a fork of the Rhodecode project that stopped being open source. Great to see that the community created an open alternative.

I serioully hope that Kallithea succeeds because, unlike GitLab et al, it supports Mercurial.

What exactly was bought? The gitorious employees? Looks like the gitorious code is gonna get scrapped.

Edit: I mean, what was the purpose of buying gitorious? The employees? Enticing the gitorious customers and users to use gitlab?

The latter, we want to communicate an upgrade path to existing Gitorious customer and users. Unfortunately we could not repurpose anything from the Gitorious codebase.

I've got a few small projects on Gitorious, mostly because I wanted to avoid a GitHub monoculture (and the Gitorious software being AGPL'd helped too). Having an easy way to import from Gitorious to GitLab is nice, but I'd like to check out GitLab's public hosting features first. I had a poke around GitLab's website, but every page seems dedicated to selling GitLab-as-a-product. Are there any publically-visible projects hosted by GitLab?

The page on the website about our SaaS GitLab.com is https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

You can view all public projects on GitLab.com via https://gitlab.com/explore

An interesting project is F-Droid, an installable catalogue of FOSS https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata

Can you elaborate in the github monoculture? What's the downside of github you're seeing?

(Just curious!)

If you're looking for hosted GitLab that is private to you or your team/company check out https://githost.io

Josh is an awesome guy and he does a great job managing GitLab servers for people.

Gogs (https://github.com/gogits/gogs) is a rather nice up and coming alternative to gitlab for self hosted repositories.

But gogs doesn't self-host its own development! IIRC gitlab didn't initially either. That it does now inspires a lot more confidence.

Uggg are you kidding me?

Why does GitLab have to kill the AGPL instance of Gitorious they aqquired? Most of the people I know who use Gitorious.org did so so we could use an AGPL service to host our repositories. GitLab simply does not do this as it uses a lax permissive license. In addition to this they impose CLAs on any contributors :/ sigh

It is really a shame that GitLab feels the need to remove the only AGPL service that fills this need. I do not know where I will be migrating my repositories, but it will not be GitLab unless they wish to offer the community an AGPL instance.

Congratulations on the acquisition. is there any plan to create mobile app for creating / browsing issues ( offline support ) in near future ?

Thanks! We have no plans for a mobile app at this point. We try to make GitLab work really well on mobile screens. There are also native mobile apps created by the community https://about.gitlab.com/applications/ but I'm not sure if they support working offline.

Please don't. We don't need apps for this, a website that works offline is more than enough.

Plus, it's really cross platform, and you don't have to work on 5 different versions of the same app, while not excluding any mobile OS.

>GitLab acquires Gitorious to bolster its on premises code collaboration platform

You guys are maybe celebrating a bit too much. Cut down on the drinks. ;)

We wrote the blog post together and this was from our (pretty awesome) account manager. Not very fit for the crowd here :)

we were experimenting with the use of GitBucket https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket as alternative, and so far seems very good for smaller repos.

Why is there a setting for Skype on user profile?

Why no XMPP, or phone, or physical address?

Skype is probably there because someone added it. Feel free to add XMPP and phone. I don't think a physical address is very practical.

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