On 25 November 2015 at 04:30, Guido van Rossum
Both seem to have commercial interest into locking users in;
From a purely pragmatic perspective though, "Import from GitHub" is already one of the features offered by GitLab, and will no doubt be a standard feature of any other open source repository management systems that gains widespread popularity in the future. Donald also noted a while back that this is a reasonable lesson to take away from
Since the commercial side of things has come up, it's worth noting that they're operating on a couple of orders of magnitude difference in scale on that front - GitHub need to generate a return sufficient to justify around $350m in capital investment, while GitLab's capital investment base is a more modest $1.5 million. The upside of GitHub's larger capital base is greater funding for the "free" side of their freemium business model, the downside is greater demands on their revenue side in order to generate a suitable return for investors in a crowded enterprise development tools market. The benefit of GitLab's lower capital base is that it means their revenue targets can be lower, which means they can be more aggressive in which features they make available entirely for free in the Community Edition. the Linux kernel Bitkeeper experiment - they used the proprietary service for as long as the vendor was playing nice, and when the relationship soured, they migrated away again. This means that while I still favour retaining a welcoming environment for strict free software advocates over going with a fully proprietary SaaS option for our workflow, I also think the available export options from GitHub are already good enough to ensure we're covered from an infrastructure risk management perspective. Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncoghlan@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia