You're right on the first point. They aren't comparable. GitLab is a community driven, open core product that is far more powerful than GitHub. GitLab has an extremely robust CI system built in. In addition, you can even use them to create private Docker registries, which I find useful for creating my own private CI images. Plus, they have a better security model (5 tiers), wildcards for branch protection, and tag protection. I'm sure there's other places that they differ, but before you disparage a company, please be informed about who they are and how great their product actually is.

Why do people say "X and Y aren't comparable" and then proceed to compare them? :)

I'm not (only) trying to be pedantic here -- I'm just pointing out the loaded language. In both business models and product recommendations, people use the word "comparable" to justify their conclusions, rather than to explain their comparisons themselves.

It is all about framing a decision for a particular use case at a particular price point.

I guess you could say I'm the kind of person that can't help but notice that modern communication seems to be fraught with this pattern: let's state our conclusions without much justification and then choose our language minimize the "rationality" of alternatives. I think we can do better, as a community.

Part of it is due to an alternate definition of comparable, which is "of equivalent quality; worthy of comparison", as opposed to "able to be likened to another; similar". It's being used as shorthand for "they aren't equivalent", and then they go to justify that assessment.

I get your point though. The form and structure of the language used, consciously of subconsciously, often conveys quite a bit more information than the words themselves impart. Sometimes this is meant to communicate or subconsciously sway the reader, sometimes it's leakage of the writer's mental state.

Exactly. With this definition, the phrase "compare and contrast" makes much more sense. The point here was to leap frog the fact that GitHub and GitLab have very comparable feature sets, and instead highlight the things that GitLab has that GitHub is totally missing.

I find the argument that Gitlab is community driven a joke. They are not. And they never can. The community edition can never be ready for more than git hosting.

We were recently evaluating it, and found that basic needs like code reviews are not covered. And their hiding of LDAP Integration (luckily the extended community stepped in and duplicated their module) is a joke.

I don't get your point. GitLab has basic code reviews [1, 2] and LDAP support [3]. LDAP support is better in EE than in CE but that's expected. What is missing for you?

1: https://gitlab.com/help/user/project/merge_requests/merge_re...

2: https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/development/code_review.html

3: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/administration/auth/ldap-ee.html

Exactly. (1) is Enterprise edition, same as proper (3) LDAP Integration.

And I forgot about squashing :)

All I say: it is expected. Gitlab is capable, just not in all editions

From a development perspective, it's actually very community driven https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?label_name%5B...

Your statements are untrue.

Not only can you do community-driven project development with Gitlab but the core product itself is also open source and community participation is encouraged. See:

https://gitlab.com/explore

https://about.gitlab.com/community/

You have obviously never used gitlab in depth. I have never seen a tech company so open about everything they do with the community.