[nemothekid]

I really don't see the value in open sourcing GitHub when Gitlab exists if you are looking for a replacement incase MS decides to go full tyrant - unless if you believe GitHub enterprise is an amazing project.

If GitHub wasn't built from the start for hosted deployments, it will probably be both expensive and a pain in the neck to run. GitLab probably has it's issues, but I won't be surprised if there are assumptions made in GitHub's code that assumes you are essentially running on high memory / high cpu machines to reduce latency.

[sushipro]

GitHub Enterprise is built from the same codebase that runs GitHub.com. And GitHub Enterprise was designed from the beginning to run on your own hardware. As far as hardware requirements, well, that kinda depends on your workload. GitHub Enterprise system requirements were higher than GitLab but we found GitHub Enterprise much more reliable. GitLab will let you run on anything but they don't really know what will work. They're still trying to figure out how to scale gitlab.com which barely has any users compared to github.com. The experience at scale is huge.

Additionally, we found functionality like HA and DR were implemented very seamlessly in GitHub Etnerprise. Easy to set up and not a hassle once it's running. GitLab basically tells you to build your own HA which isn't something we're interested in doing.

[freedomben]

This would be interesting to hear about from an insider. I suspect you're right. Having worked at a company that open sources most of their code, I've seen first hand how much better the code quality is when you know it's going out to the world. When you know it's gonna be hidden and only a handful of people will ever see it, you're much less hesitant to push up hacks :-) We open sourced something that wasn't originally going to be open, and we spent weeks going through cleaning up and refactoring things to avoid public embarrassment.

[kanwisher]

What’s the business value in spending weeks of developer time refactoring things that are going open source. For some industries it’s required like blockchain. For average shop seems like more expense with no profit

[freedomben]

In our case, the business value was that it was a contractual clause with a customer. The idea was that keeping a million dollar customer and spending weeks refactoring was cheaper than losing the customer and getting sued for breach of contract. So we're probably in a similar boat as block chain like you mention.

However, I think you underestimate the value of open source. Besides being the right thing to do (respects freedom, allows developers who built it to use their code later in line with license agreement, allows others to learn by contributing or at least reading, plus many other benefits) it can be a powerful recruiting tool. There's real business value in getting good hires.