If today was the first day that you saw GitLab, perhaps you don't have the domain knowledge to make any of this claims. Nothing you said here makes sense. The Git as a prefix in the name is just a technicality, the same way I could create an operating system called YeahOS and everyone would understand that OS is a suffix that blends into the branding.
But what makes you sound particularly ignorant it's calling GitLab a clone of Github. They are both git platforms, that's it. By that metric BitBucket, Gitea, Gogs, CodeCommit, Phabricator, etc., are all clones of GitHub.
If anything, recent GitHub functionalities like GitHub Actions are a clone of mature GitLab functionality like GitLab's CI.
Yet if you named it myOS and copied the look and feel from iOS everyone could see that you created an iOS clone.
That's the only point I was making but seems that many feelings were hurt in the process.
What I was trying to establish is that there's really no solid ground to claim that any Git platform is a copy of another one since they are all essentially productivity and team-work wrappers around Git.
If you're talking about the general information architecture that's how SourceForge was even before Git existed, so hardly an original idea.
I think that's fairly obvious. I guess I didn't explain clear enough the point I was trying to make in the original post. I kind of regret writing it now.
Personally I don't think the GitLab UI looks that similar to GitHub's, and to me it looks and feels kind of clunky, and lacks contrast.
GitLab Core is open source which is the base for the Community Edition. The paid tiers are based on Core and add Enterprise licensed proprietary code, following our open core business model.
More about our Open Source stewardship: https://about.gitlab.com/company/stewardship/
Gitlab is not a Github clone.
While similar, the companies are different in the approaches, the platforms are different in their pricing (both having impacted the other which ultimately has helped consumers).
Your argument would hold true of any word processor. I think it's an unfair assessment of two products targeting the same specific users.
And now I finally went and browsed some repositories and it's clear as that they were very much "inspired" but Github's design, it's practically a github clone, at least in that regard (although something is a bit off in the smoothness)
Maybe one day I'll find myself in a similar position and see things differently but this blatant copying always seemed ridiculous to the point where I would feel ashamed to lead this type of strategy.