For people wondering what makes GitLab any different, the answer is that GitLab is an open source product at its core. This means that anybody can run their own instance. If the company ends up moving in a direction that the community isn’t comfortable with, then it’s always possible to fork it.
There’s also a proposal https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517 to support federation between GitLab instances. With this approach there wouldn’t even be a need for a single central hub. One of the main advantages of Git is that it’s a decentralized system, and it’s somewhat ironic that GitHub constitutes a single point of failure.
In theory this could work similarly to the way Mastodon works currently. Individuals and organizations could setup GitLab servers that would federate between each other. This could allow searching for repos across the federation, tagging issues across projects on different instances, and potentially fail over if instances mirror content. With this approach you wouldn’t be relying on a single provider to host everybody’s projects in one place.
There’s also a proposal https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/4517 to support federation between GitLab instances. With this approach there wouldn’t even be a need for a single central hub. One of the main advantages of Git is that it’s a decentralized system, and it’s somewhat ironic that GitHub constitutes a single point of failure.
In theory this could work similarly to the way Mastodon works currently. Individuals and organizations could setup GitLab servers that would federate between each other. This could allow searching for repos across the federation, tagging issues across projects on different instances, and potentially fail over if instances mirror content. With this approach you wouldn’t be relying on a single provider to host everybody’s projects in one place.