Besides aversion to any particular vendor in general, is there a reason you wouldn't want to use them?

I maintain a couple open source projects on Github that belong to the US Government. Getting them open sourced at all was hard enough. Convincing the powers that be to let me use Gitlab isn't practical.

I assume the intersection of projects that need a no-budget solution for hosting an https site and projects that belong to the US government is zero.

Am I missing something?

I mean, yes, if you have practical problems that make gitlab harder to use, don't use it. No problem at all. But it is still a perfectly valid solution for the problem the GP was trying to solve.

Open source means the project can be redistributed by any user. So any user, including yourself, can re-host the project on Gitlab.

That's very interesting! I wonder if there's anyone at GitLab interested in becoming an approved vendor for the US government/DOD. I also wonder if the code.mil people are interested in getting the ball rolling on that from their end.

Couldn't you just fork it yourself on gitlab? Or any random person fork it?

Only for Pages, though. (Disclaimer: I haven't actually tried the following setup myself, since I run my own server.) GitLab supports repository mirroring, so you can keep using GitHub for everything else. When you push code to GitHub, it will be automatically pulled into GitLab and trigger the CI job for Pages, generating and publishing the site.

I much prefer GitLab to GitHub.