[earthboundkid]

Competition is good for the end user, but ISTM that Microsoft bought the biggest player in the space so that they could drown the competition in the bathtub and monopolize the market. It's a smart play from Microsoft's point of view, but FTC should never have permitted the acquisition in the first place and should prosecute them for illegal dumping now.

[stevehawk]

Github and Gitlab are not so important to any market as to warrant federal intervention. Both of them are easily replaced by anyone standing up their own git server. Not to mention the countless other code repository sites / software packages.

[johannes1234321]

Moving of isn't easy

- thanks to GitHub pages and markdown rendering your tool's homepage is the Git{Hub|Lab|...} page. That page is linked from "everywhere" else and indexed in search engines

- all history aside from code is in there (discussions in bug issues and pull requests etc.) getting them out is possible, but all the linkage between commit messages and those might be problematic to migrate

- contributors are often only known by their handle on that page, migrating of requires new setup of permissions and mapping of usernames to trust on a social level

- there are tons of hooks configured for many projects

- as GitHub Actions and GitLab CI gain more and more traction workflows depend on those

"Just move the repo" is a fallancy which doesn't work. I have no doubts medium term about Microsoft steering GitHub, but I fear a single entity being so central in the opensoruce world (also consider npm acquisition etc.)

[marceloabsousa]

I disagree. Github and Gitlab are so much more than just code hosting platforms. Their ability to influence software development is increasing to the point that if both Github and Gitlab suddenly disappear the consequences would be quite dramatic.

[earthboundkid]

Wow, a true HN “I could do that in a weekend”. Good point, all software is trivial and anyone could recreate a website with thousands of man hours behind them in a long weekend.

[stevehawk]

Are we suddenly pretending that Redmine and others don't exist for self hosting?

[earthboundkid]

Yes, there are lots of options in the space, but no one wants to use an option that is 75% as good as Github and still costs more. The only way to gain marketshare is to either get bundled into an enterprise contract (so it doesn't matter if you suck) or be better than Github and still underprice your product. Even Google gave up on their code hosting option because there's no way to get market share without setting money on fire. God bless Gitlab, but if Microsoft keeps supporting Github like this (and the FTC keeps taking long naps), they're going to run out money and die.