I can't tell if there is a real shift, I would say no. GitHub, in a lot of people, is synonymous to Git. GitLab is superior in a lot of ways, more feature, open source, very open as you pointed out. Their pricing model supports free private repos. Not sure what it would take to really make people reconsider GitHub as the default goto place to host OSS repos.
GitLab is great, but it's kind of a copycat project. Nothing wrong with that, it's just there really isn't a compelling reason to join beyond "less-predatory pricing".
And the people who care about that use private repos, not OSS.
It'ss quite bad for my company. We have to pay per repo and we like to create quite a lot of small libs and microservices. I'd like to have a option of per user payment.
Very similar here. My startup is 3 years old with ~10-15 developers, but we make many small repos -- about 150 in that amount of time.
Even though it's not tons of code, GitHub's pricing breaks down horribly in this case. I think that that in the long run many startups will move to embrace GitLab in the early days for price if nothing else.
Suppose you are a web agency. Every single project for every single client should be version-controlled, right? But that tends to quickly add up when using GitHub - about a dollar per project per month.
So, if my company finishes 30 projects per year, we'd be paying $360/year to GitHub for what is essentially "storing a backup". And if we do this every year, that's $1000/year within 3 years.
Not to mention that for "Organizations" the prices are doubled. For some reason. So... $2000/year?
Right now the same job is done by a $5/mo linode, with the prospects of upgrading to $10/mo.
For example, a lot of people complain about issues on GitHub. GitLab handles those much better, that could be a compelling reason to move, but somehow it doesn't seem to be enough.
Private repo can be useful for early stage of OSS projects.
Agreed though that it still feels too much like a clone of GitHub. The UI for example is way to close to the original.
Having used both there's more than enough in either that's bad to justify a switch to the other if you really want to. I personally prefer github's warts to gitlab's. In particular, I find that general site navigation on gitlab is quite tedious and it rarely centres useful information first. But that is very much a qualitative and not a quantitative complaint.
The main thing I find extra useful on gitlab is the ability to mark a MR as a WIP.
Glad you like our WIP function. Do you maybe have any suggestions how we can make navigation better and/or examples of pages where you are missing information?
The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive (sometimes what I want is in the sidebar but sometimes it's in the main page). For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar? And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use". And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it? This is something I feel GitHub does better -- things are much faster to access and IMO much more intuitive.
> The decision of what does and doesn't go in the sidebar is very non-intuitive
We try to put top level navigation into sidebar and everything else in the main page. For example navigation to `Projects` is in sidebar however tabs to switch between starred projects or personal projects is in main body.
> For example, in groups and user profiles you can find the list of projects in the main body of the page (and it's not visible immediately). Why is it not in the sidebar if you have a sidebar?
> And then the ordering is also a bit weird -- I don't think many people would consider the order in GitLab to be "in order of importance" or even "regular use"
Ordering of projects is either by last activity or alphabetically. But in any case there is usually a dropdown in UI to sort by other criteria.
> And why can't I see the set of files in the repo when I first open it?
You can set what to see first at https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences page. We believe README is something people would like to see first we allow users to set different default page based on their preferences.
P.S. Thank you very much for your feedback. It will help us make GitLab UI more intuitive.
It's not about the number of approvers (just one), but more the approver knowing that the submitter is done making revisions. Usually after the first merge request, we do code review then wait for revisions, that's when the tag happens.
Now this would be awesome:
> We’re thinking about more improvements to the Merge Request Approvals, the main improvement being automatic suggestions for reviewers, based on the history of the changed files in the merge request. For instance, if Jane worked a lot on a certain class and you submit a change to that class, Jane gets suggested to approve your merge request.
Today we are using the self-hosted community edition though.
I believe every Techstars batch does a tools survey across batch companies (at least R/GA Techstars in NYC did) then emails everyone the summary with bar charts.
The one I have is mostly about analytics, sales, and support tools, and unfortunately repository hosting wasn't a question asked. I also wish they would make this data source public so others could see shifts early -- for example the wave from HipChat to Slack would have been very visible.
Perhaps StackShare might be the closest open source of similar data.
