Ask HN: Should I share my new open source project on GitHub or GitLab? - ReedJessen
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LyndsySimon
I put all of my new open source stuff on GitLab - not because it's better per
se, but because I feel like GitHub has a bit of a cultural monopoly and that
an active competitor will push the entire community to a higher standard.

GitLab _does_ have the advantage of an excellent, container-based CI... but
there's nothing stopping you from using GitHub to host your repositories and
GitLab to run your CI if that's what you choose.

~~~
neilalexander
Sadly I walked away from GitLab because gitlab.com seems to go down
unreasonably often and I don't feel like hosting my own instance of it for the
small projects I'm working on or sharing. GitHub has been perfect in this
regard.

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staticgarden
I'd go with GitHub, your potential users/contributors have a higher
probability of having an account on GitHub which makes it easy for
contributions. Moreover, there are a hundred free CI/CD services which work
with GitHub and not GitLab.

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qz_
GitHub, because everyone uses it and because the developers haven't ever
accidentally deleted the production database.

~~~
qw
[https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-
outage/](https://blog.github.com/2010-11-15-today-s-outage/)

Seems that Github also destroyed a database.

Accidents happen. Both companies seems to be open about their issues and are
willing to improve. I do not hold it against them.

It could in fact result in a a more stable service, as the developers will
start thinking about all the other stuff that may happen.

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gaius
I would say Gitlab to encourage a healthy ecosystem. VSTS will be doing public
Git soon as well.

~~~
FlorianRappl
Interesting... do you have more information on this? Haven't read about it yet
and would like to know more.

~~~
gaius
Recent blog post [https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/04/27/vsts-
publ...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/04/27/vsts-public-
projects-limited-preview/#comment-528925)

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amolo
Doesn't really matter. But I'd pick Github. Github's familiar to more Devs.
It's hard to find people using Gitlab but haven't used Github but the vice
versa is fewer than few.

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stephenr
Are you really expecting quality code contributions from people that find it
hard/not worth their time to create an account on gitlab?

~~~
staticgarden
Adding another road block is not gonna help your open source project :) Every
little additional thing counts.

~~~
stephenr
And a monoculture is not gonna help your industry.

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hungerstrike
Well, I would say to push on GitHub and mirror to GitLab, but GitLab only
allows that with their enterprise edition -
[https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.htm...](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/workflow/repository_mirroring.html#overview)

So to use both you’d have to push to both, which doesn’t seem like a hard task
to automate.

~~~
sytse
If you host on GitLab and push to GitHub that is now open source
[https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/22/gitlab-10-8-released/](https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/22/gitlab-10-8-released/)

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darnir
GitLab. We at GNU Wget have almost entirely moved all our development
processes to Gitlab and its been amazing.

The CI integration is far better than what github + Travis offer.

Gitlab has been steadily improving and I don't see any lags and slowdowns
which used to be a thing in the past.

Not to mention that they are far more open about their platform and don't
enforce propriety scripts on you.

~~~
romanovcode
Also, GitLab itself is open-source.

Ironically GitHub (the biggest open-source platform) is not.

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aoeu34234
GitLab, as users can sign in with their github ID if needed.

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rambojazz
It would depend on your goals... If you just want to fit with everybody else,
use github. If you don't mind the dual licensing model of gitlab, go with it.
If you really care about open source, either use notabug[1], savannah[2], or
self host your own. Personally, my preference is with notabug. I only use
github extremely rarely.

[1] [https://notabug.org](https://notabug.org) [2]
[https://savannah.nongnu.org](https://savannah.nongnu.org)

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EspadaV9
Why not host it on GitLab and set up push mirroring to GitHub? You get the
advantages from the extra features that GitLab offers and the extra visibility
from GitHub.

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stephenr
Anything but github really, because monoculture and cargo culting are bad for
our industry.

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KayL
Most trackers only tracking Github, e.g.:
[https://risingstars.js.org/2017/en/](https://risingstars.js.org/2017/en/)

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mabynogy
You can just mirror your source code there to make it visible and continue to
handle to workflow as usual.

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znpy
why not both ?

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matthewmacleod
I would say that a canonical source repo is important generally - but so long
as it prominently says it’s not the main repo maybe it’s okay?

~~~
JoshTriplett
Having a mirror on github is a common practice, but unfortunately, while you
can turn off the issue tracker, github does _not_ support turning off pull
requests. So, you either need to include a prominent note that pull requests
will be ignored and closed, or alternatively, have a workflow for handling
github pull requests via whatever site you do use.

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O_H_E
Apparently GitHub is closed source

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MmM218
Bitbucket

