Re:Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
by pmilot on Monday January 18, 2016 @01:14PM
(#10925851)
"Wave" might be too strong a word, but I've seen three or four posts on HN in the last few days that were pretty critical of Github's closed source nature and insufficient transparency.
I'm not sure why offering a free software edition somehow gives you a pass. Both Github and Gitlab are commercial entities as far as I know.
Anyway, my concern wasn't a big deal, I was just a bit taken aback at the opportunism. In retrospect, I think my reaction was a bit overblown.
Re:Dear open-source maintainers, a letter from GitLab
by Jedd on Monday January 18, 2016 @06:16PM
(#10927729)
Fair enough. I feel like there's been stories / sentiment along this line for a while, though apart from Microsoft's ChakraCore announcement last week (?), the only two specific stories I recall from last year were about github's valuation (US$2B) and when they threatened to remove someone's repository because it contained the string 'retard'.
You're right that both github and gitlab are commercial endeavours - obviously very much in the same space - so I'd expect them both to pop up in any discussion about bug & feature trackers, community involvement, etc - especially if there's the potential to improve their business.
On the other side of the coin, I'm curious why Github seems to often get a pass by the free software community.
Anyway, opening sentence of gitlab's open letter: "The letter of GitHub’s open source community is clearly not addressed to us, but we’re thinking a lot about the issues that were mentioned in it."
Does that cover your concerns?
I think if github was the free software entity, and gitlab had no free software edition available, then the tone would be, as you suggest, totally inappropriate. However given the arrangement is the other way around, it seems quite reasonable they would hop onto this issue at this time, especially given the very clear caveat quoted above.