
GitLab acquires Gitorious - waffle_ss
https://about.gitlab.com/2015/03/03/gitlab-acquires-gitorious/
======
davexunit
Sad news. I moved all of my repos from GitHub to Gitorious in order to get
away from proprietary software, and now I'm (almost) back at square one. The
public GitLab instance at gitlab.com runs the proprietary version, so I cannot
move my repos there.

I like GitLab more than Gitorious on a purely technical level, but GitLab
unfortunately has a CLA[0] and uses the MIT expat license, whereas Gitorious
used the AGPL.

I guess I will just self-host my own GitLab CE instance now.

[0] [http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-
cla.html](http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2014/06/09/do-not-need-cla.html)

~~~
sytse
I'm sorry to hear this. For the reasons of running a proprietary version
please see my other answer in this thread
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9139559)

We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law. But
your article looks interesting and I'll read it.

Great to hear you plan to run GitLab CE, we hope you'll enjoy it.

~~~
davexunit
>We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law.

I appreciate that. I think you have good intentions. The author of the article
is Bradley Kuhn, who works at the Software Freedom Conservancy. He's an expert
when it comes to the legal aspects surrounding free software projects, so
perhaps having a conversation with him about the CLA would be a worthwhile
experience.

~~~
sytse
OK, thanks, we'll consider that.

------
sytse
GitLab CEO here, I would love to discuss what people think about this and any
questions please have about moving their code.

~~~
conductor
First I want to thank you and the developers for your work on GitLab.
Currently GitLab's binary packages are distributed as a big rpm/deb with every
package needed by GitLab (like PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx etc.) inside it, and
there are no official repositories, so one must manually download and install
the Big package. Why can't we use the more traditional way with package
dependencies?

~~~
worklogin
I want to piggy-back off this: PLEASE all projects, continue to offer
monolithic packages as an option. It takes an act of Congress to get some
servers internet access to fetch packages; being able to download a VMWare
image or a blob to install makes testing a whole lot easier.

~~~
hobarrera
So how do you periodically download security updates on that same server? (it
_clearly_ has network access since you run gitlab on it).

I think your issue lies elsewhere, not on the packaging scheme.

~~~
sytse
From these servers you can frequently access a fileserver on which you can
download files from the internet. But the server itself can't access the
internet.

------
pnathan
Kallithea[1] is a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. It is written
in Python and has an active mailing list. It supports both Mercurial and Git.

[https://kallithea-scm.org/](https://kallithea-scm.org/)

~~~
jboynyc
For a collection of GitHub alternatives (broadly speaking), including
Kallithea, you can consult this list:

[http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives](http://jboy.silk.co/tag/github%20alternatives)

~~~
sytse
Thanks for including GitLab on your list. Do you know GitLab also offers
integrated issue tracking? For example see [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitlab-ce/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues)

~~~
thecatspaw
gitlab does offer integrated issue tracking, yes. in fact, you linked to it
yourself.

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jordigh
What exactly was bought? The gitorious employees? Looks like the gitorious
code is gonna get scrapped.

Edit: I mean, what was the purpose of buying gitorious? The employees?
Enticing the gitorious customers and users to use gitlab?

~~~
sytse
The latter, we want to communicate an upgrade path to existing Gitorious
customer and users. Unfortunately we could not repurpose anything from the
Gitorious codebase.

~~~
pjc50
Acquishutdown! So were they going out of business or is there another reason
for shutting them down?

~~~
sytse
Their business was no longer sustainable and they wanted to shut the company
down without a bankruptcy.

~~~
zem
thanks for the straight answer to that! hope it works out.

------
thristian
I've got a few small projects on Gitorious, mostly because I wanted to avoid a
GitHub monoculture (and the Gitorious software being AGPL'd helped too).
Having an easy way to import from Gitorious to GitLab is nice, but I'd like to
check out GitLab's public hosting features first. I had a poke around GitLab's
website, but every page seems dedicated to selling GitLab-as-a-product. _Are_
there any publically-visible projects hosted by GitLab?

~~~
sytse
The page on the website about our SaaS GitLab.com is
[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

You can view all public projects on GitLab.com via
[https://gitlab.com/explore](https://gitlab.com/explore)

An interesting project is F-Droid, an installable catalogue of FOSS
[https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata](https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata)

------
joshfng
If you're looking for hosted GitLab that is private to you or your
team/company check out [https://githost.io](https://githost.io)

~~~
sytse
Josh is an awesome guy and he does a great job managing GitLab servers for
people.

------
tetron
Gogs ([https://github.com/gogits/gogs](https://github.com/gogits/gogs)) is a
rather nice up and coming alternative to gitlab for self hosted repositories.

~~~
mlinksva
But gogs doesn't self-host its own development! IIRC gitlab didn't initially
either. That it does now inspires a lot more confidence.

~~~
Vendan
meh, gogs doesn't inspire confidence. There is some serious issues going on,
resulting in the inability to handle more then one request at a time. I
brought it up to the dev, and did some explorations that found lots of data
race problems, and got this lovely gem back from the dev:

"In my point of view, as long as no deadlock..data race is unavoidable."

------
workingonit
Uggg are you kidding me?

Why does GitLab have to kill the AGPL instance of Gitorious they aqquired?
Most of the people I know who use Gitorious.org did so so we could use an AGPL
service to host our repositories. GitLab simply does not do this as it uses a
lax permissive license. In addition to this they impose CLAs on any
contributors :/ _sigh_

It is really a shame that GitLab feels the need to remove the only AGPL
service that fills this need. I do not know where I will be migrating my
repositories, but it will not be GitLab unless they wish to offer the
community an AGPL instance.

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ing33k
Congratulations on the acquisition. is there any plan to create mobile app for
creating / browsing issues ( offline support ) in near future ?

~~~
sytse
Thanks! We have no plans for a mobile app at this point. We try to make GitLab
work really well on mobile screens. There are also native mobile apps created
by the community
[https://about.gitlab.com/applications/](https://about.gitlab.com/applications/)
but I'm not sure if they support working offline.

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nickysielicki
>GitLab acquires Gitorious to bolster its on premises code collaboration
platform

You guys are maybe celebrating a bit too much. Cut down on the drinks. ;)

~~~
sytse
We wrote the blog post together and this was from our (pretty awesome) account
manager. Not very fit for the crowd here :)

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hans4
we were experimenting with the use of GitBucket
[https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket](https://github.com/takezoe/gitbucket)
as alternative, and so far seems very good for smaller repos.

------
cnst
Why is there a setting for Skype on user profile?

Why no XMPP, or phone, or physical address?

~~~
sytse
Skype is probably there because someone added it. Feel free to add XMPP and
phone. I don't think a physical address is very practical.

