Re:Gitlab More Than Doubles Valuation to $2.75B Ahead of Pla...
by kardos on Wednesday September 18, 2019 @01:20PM
(#21007632)
You might be right but it sounds pretty thin. Are developers really roaming the internet aimlessly in search of something to develop on, and decide based on whether it's hosted on github or gitlab? That's not consistent with my experience, I use gitlab, bitbucket, github, gnu savannah, etc, due to various scattered projects and I don't find that the git hosting platform even registers as a consideration when finding projects to contribute to.
On switching -- from GitHub, yes you might need some compelling reasons to go through all that resetup work. Migrating to GitLab from some ageing bespoke system is a much easier choice.
It's the ongoing thoughts that go through your mind like using github 99% of the time but having to context switch to a completely different app / UI for that 1 other project that uses gitlab. Unless that 1 project is incredibly useful then most of the time you'll talk yourself out of signing up or even browsing the repo (let alone contribute to it).
It's almost like people who use mailing lists for bug reports. It's such an out of place / cumbersome thing to sign up for vs filling out a github issue that you've done a 100 times already.
The power of familiarity is real. It takes astronomically sized benefits to get people to switch and from what I've seen gitlab has not done that (not because they are bad, it just hasn't happened yet) and the proof is in the results. If they did offer a massively better service than github then people would have already switched for open source projects.