[beardedwizard]

GitHub has been failing upward for more than 5 years. They could have totally dominated software development and security - failed. Could have been the undisputed champion of code hosting - failed. Should have dominated development co-pilots - failed.

I actually find it a little reassuring that they can't seem to get out of their own way.

[stevage]

They're not the champion of code hosting?

[beardedwizard]

It's a close call - I make this based on the fact that GitHub is viewed as an anti-choice by some in the community, a huge change from the "you don't use GitHub?!?!" energy they had pre-acquisition.

The MS acquisition traded the developer community to briefly appeal to enterprises, then quickly let both down.

[ctkhn]

Both the startups I worked at and the mega corps are all on github or moving there from bitbucket. They are in a bit of autpilot mode in terms of useful new features aside from actions but I can't think of any new bitbucket feature since I graduated and started working.

[beardedwizard]

Bitbucket is not a player, as you said there are only people leaving. Gitlab has a better enterprise posture than GitHub and can be deployed more securely. Most developers aren't unhappy with GitHub, but IT and security teams are.

[kyawzazaw]

i concur

[stevage]

I dunno, for me Github is better than it was pre-acquisition. Sure, the rate of improvement has slowed a lot, but they did fix some old annoyances. But come to think of it, I can't really think of any ways that it has enshittified. I don't use any of the CI/Actions stuff though.

[MassiveQuasar]

They were before they got acquired by Microsoft.

The fact that they are is not the results of the Microsoft takeover.

[stevage]

Then I don't understand the inclusion in the list above.

[sofixa]

To be fair, they have been behind the competition for many years. Gitlab had extremely good CI, security scanning, organisational concepts, etc. for years before GitHub introduced their ones (and Actions still has a worse UX, and GitHub still doesn't have anything below an organisation).

[no_wizard]

GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively.

I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus

I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.

GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.

This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.

[sofixa]

> I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus

Nah, I hate that. At my job we have a few different orgs, with terrible SSO boundaries (having to auth multiple times to GitHub because I work on repositories from different GitHub orgs). Allowing you to have a proper structure with nestedness, while still having good search, is great. You can also easily move projects and namespaces around, so if the structure doesn't work, it can evolve.

Why would you have the 50 library repositories you've had to fork as top level projects polluting your org? You also can't really do shared variable, environment, CI configs between repos of the same project/type.

[mdaniel]

And it being open core (MIT) means spinning up a version to test something is incredibly easy. Not exactly resource cheap, as it's still a rails app with multiple servers "smuggled" in the docker image, but it is easy

And I have long held that they are hungry, shipping like clockwork on or about the 20th of every month, showing up with actual improvements all the time https://about.gitlab.com/releases/ It seems this month brings 18.0 with it, for whatever that version bump happens to include

They also have a pretty good track record of "liberating" some premium features into the MIT side of things; I think it's luck of the draw, but it's not zero and it doesn't seem to be tied to any underhanded reason that I can spot

[beardedwizard]

Why gitlab hasn't been able to capitalize on GitHub's many failures is almost as interesting as GitHub's fall.

I think the GitHub brand is still stronger and people just don't "care" about gitlab.

[mdaniel]

Yeah, it's almost certainly the network effect. Although poor GitLab isn't doing themselves any favors by picking what seems to be the slowest web framework one can possibly imagine

But, anytime I am empowered to pick, I'm going to pick GitLab 100% of the time because it has every feature that I care about and "being popular" isn't a feature that I care about

[twodave]

Well you’re right (especially wrt things like security scanning), but you sort of have to include Azure DevOps in the conversation nowadays. I think the end goal for Microsoft is to get the larger organizations into ADO, either cross-pollinate pipelines and actions or just replace actions with pipelines at some point, and leave GitHub for simpler project structures and public codebases.

That’s why you won’t see a ton of work go into e.g. issues/projects on GitHub. Those features all already exist and are very robust in ADO, so if you need those kinds of things (and the reporting an enterprise would want to be able to run on that data), then you belong on ADO.

[filmgirlcw]

I can say with a high level of confidence that the goal is definitely not to push larger orgs to ADO over GitHub. ADO is and will continue to be supported and you’re right that its project management features are much more advanced than GitHub, but the mission is not to push people off of ADO and into GitHub.

[twodave]

Your opening and closing statements aren’t mutually exclusive, but I can’t tell if one is a typo (or if so, which one it is).

I didn’t mean to imply that MS wanted to migrate anyone, just that the different offerings serve different kinds of customers, so you can’t really just compare GitLab to GitHub and say MS is lacking in serving some group of them.

[filmgirlcw]

Yeah I had a typo -- the statement should have been the mission is to push people from ADO to GitHub -- sorry.

The official guidance from Microsoft since probably 2019 has been to encourage all greenfield projects to GitHub, as opposed to ADO.