Anecdotally I've found Github much cleaner-looking, much faster and more usable than Gitlab. Github was never opensource, and I think people used it for all of the above. I'd be surprised if the recent acquisition changes that.
I feel like part of this minority. I find GitLab's UI less clean and more difficult to process, and miss the social interaction features like the feed.
I preferred GitHub's UI because it was cleaner and much faster to load.
I'm part of it too. Some years ago I was looking for an alternative to GitHub, with free private repositories for some personal projects I wanted to keep private. After a few weeks on GitLab I ended up moving to BitBucket because it was generally faster to use
I think if Github does one or two huge updates that are really well received post-acquisition, preferably the kind of updates only possible with a tech giant behind you, they will secure their position for a long time. For most users Github still has the best product - how people are forgetting that is beyond me.
"preferably the kind of updates only possible with a tech giant behind you"
What kinds of these? Its never been the case that 25% more engineers means 25% more progress and github is a mature product made by a company that already employees a signifiant staff.
The logical thing would be not to piss off the existing users and use github to add value to existing Microsoft properties. So some new integration with Microsoft things?
Expanding the Github Education package, integrating Github offerings with the Spark program, applying Bing search expertise to Github code search, creating a more flexible pricing model for hobbyist users, expanding their free offering, creating better Desktop/mobile applications for Github services (better the the open source ones currently available at least).
Probably because Bitbucket is a terrible product. It has the worst interface of the group, and less-than-minimal support for pull requests (comments disappear when unrelated changes are made, aren’t easy to browse, aren’t related to a review; only options are approve and permanently close; code expansion doesn’t work past a certain point, and doesn’t work at all if the pull request comes from a repo you don’t have access to even though you could just merge the pull request and get it).
Also required users making private forks of paid-for organization private repos to pay again to give access to all team members at once last time I used it, but I guess that’s not relevant for open-source migration.
I would argue that Atlassian has better rapport with engineering manager types. Their products integrate and bundle quite nicely which is compelling for many organizations. As a dev, I'm not a fan of their UX but I've known quite a few PMs that are JIRA masters and love the fully integrated solutions Atlassian offers.
Does Atlassian have better rapport with the businessy set that often makes purchasing decisions? Yes.
Better rapport with developers? Probably not.
(and, FWIW, we use Bitbucket/Jira and honestly I'm fine with them - their updates just tend to be full of the annoying things a bad PHB would love and light on the things developers care about)
Doubt it, in the long run. I also question the move from one VC-backed company to another unless you're only using their self hosted options (though I guess being open source is better).