[teppifk]

> Does anyone know why GitLab hasn't taken off so much amongst open source projects?

The marketing is pretty bad for one. Go to gitlab.com and you see a site that is mostly extolling the virtues of their commercial product and pricing. There is a "try gitlab for free" but it is aimed very much as a try-before-you-buy for businesses. That's all good and fine, but it is the polar opposite of how github went about acquiring their network. github was marketed heavily as a social site, their marketing was viral.

I don't think it is wrong, but if gitlab is trying to convey messaging that they are "social coding" platform or even an open-source project host, and not just b2b, they are doing a pretty poor job of it.

[gmueckl]

I recently started to ship around for hosting solutions and this showed me how much github is leeching off the openly visible projects. Everything is focussed on making projwcts and users as visible as possible. Site wide search, directories of hosted projects, free user account to get started as a contributor...

Extreme SEO for hosted public projects aerves as a marketing trojan hirse for their commercial offers. At the same time, the networking effect forces everybody to stay on github or massively lose visibility. The frustrating part is that most other hosters don't get that - especially none that support some actual VCSes instead of a glorified patch database manager.

If I could stomach writing all the web frontend and plumbing stuff for a hosting service and doing all the marketing, I'd try to start my own. I have harder and more interesting problems to solve, though.