Personally I feel for pieces of software like this it's fair to more or less clone the user interface. There's a lot of effort built up in understanding how to use this tool. Think of the complaints LibreOffice gets for not looking enough like Word, or GIMP for not looking enough like Photoshop.
Plus, Gitlab is already open source, so can you really call it "ripping off"? If you're referring moreso to Github, then I think Gitlab did it first and Gogs is following that trend. I'm sure both projects improve on UI where they feel best.
It's one thing to offer the same UI elements and experience, it's another thing to make it look identical in colors, spacing, fonts, icons, etc... They took it quite far imho.
Can you show some screenshots of what you mean? Gogs[0] looks plenty different from Gitlab[1] in colors, fonts, icons, and spacing. Hardly identical, but both clearly inspired from Github.
GitLab could definitely have been a bit more original with the name, but actually the UI is very different from GitHub. Which has its pros and cons, of course.
Just wanted to say that neither being the same of different is a goal for GitLab, we just want to have an easy to understand, efficient and beautiful interface.
Personally I feel for pieces of software like this it's fair to more or less clone the user interface. There's a lot of effort built up in understanding how to use this tool. Think of the complaints LibreOffice gets for not looking enough like Word, or GIMP for not looking enough like Photoshop.
Plus, Gitlab is already open source, so can you really call it "ripping off"? If you're referring moreso to Github, then I think Gitlab did it first and Gogs is following that trend. I'm sure both projects improve on UI where they feel best.