[youseecomrade]

I think the network effect is too great to ignore. I would guess the number of potential contributors you get just by using GitHub, where many people have an account and know the workflow/UI, is bigger than any other place.

5 years from now when GitLab is acquired by Google we'll have to migrate again.

[sytse]

Or export you projects to someone else running GitLab. All the functionality to run a forge in GitLab is open source and export/import is open source as well.

[Systemic33]

Same can be said of Android, but most simply people don't.

[shmerl]

At least Gitlab can be forked in case of disaster. You can't do it for Github.

[jakevn]

Which Gitlab? The software is less important than the ecosystem. Git is the major component, but Github/Gitlab are about usefully centralizing it. Gitlab is still a centralized service, even if there are N instances of centralization.

In other words, I don't know how much use it is to fork Gitlab if the community around it is dispersed. Git is already based around decentralization, and I don't see how running my own instance of Gitlab makes it any less disruptive when the most popular instance of Gitlab is disbanded.

[noobermin]

Hmm, if there are N instances of centralization, that is still more decentralized than N=1 instances.

[gsich]

Well you don't need to. You can use gitlab or gitea.

[rurban]

But how do you transport your issues and CI integration and deployment? The googlecode to github transport was already a desaster. Code is easy, it's the rest which has the value.

[gsich]

https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#list-issues then reimport it with whatever your target system provides.

Edit your CI scripts. Your CI should not be dependent on Github to work, besides maybe pulling code from it. But then it's just a simple change.

[rurban]

Issue importing rarely works. It needs a lot of related changes all over, which cannot be automated.

I edit my CI scripts almost daily, until the workflow is acceptable. I try all the others constantly, but it's a headache and needs weeks of time until it works good enough. Github only hosts the results and releases, but still.

Just last week I spent again a full day to get the encrypted auth working for github deployment from some random new CI. My CI's do work together with connected hooks, e.g. if appveyor and travis passes, merge to master, then appveyor deploys the binaries to github, then the release is published, which sets a tag, which triggers travis to make distcheck and deploy to the very same release on github.

On github I have static pages with custom domain names for free. On github I can host releases and dailies for free. Someone needs to pay for it. Better a big company which backs this.

I'm a bit sceptical with Microsoft as I'm sceptical with Google. You can never trust PM's in big companies. But so far I give them the benefit of doubt, they clearly love github (unlike google which didn't love code.google), and we'll all see.