[core-workflow] Software Factory

[Nick Coghlan]

On 25 November 2015 at 04:30, Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:
> Both seem to have commercial interest into locking users in;

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.

>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
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 at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia