I setup Gitorious for the company that I used to work for, but it did not allow for fine-grained control of access permissions. (Everything is public for members.)

gitorious is for oss projects only, no?

gitorious is open-source, therefore you can run your own instance.

Gitorious is a grueling day long challenge of what feels like a somewhat hacky process to get it installed.

That has been true and still is if you do it manually. There are, however, several scripts assisting you at the install, like this chef cookbook:

https://gitorious.org/chef-cookbooks/chef-gitorious

You should use gitolite, it's a breeze to set up.

They're two entirely different things... this is actually powered by gitolite and looks incredibly easy to setup

Oh, sorry, I was confused by the software that preceded gitolite. Disregard that, thanks.

For what it's worth, we were both wrong and about the same thing. GitLab is powered by Gitosis, rather than Gitolite, though it appears that may be changing. Gitorious is powered by it's own solution I think and is comparable to GitLab/GitHub.

And redmine, trac, etc.

They hosted their code on github, doesn't make much sense to do that IMHO.

Doesn't make sense to open source a Github clone or doesn't make sense to host the code on Github?

If the answer were the former, I'd have to say that many a team use Git internally without being able to host it on a third party service and would benefit from a simple UI to make things easier. If the answer was the later, I'd have to say that any code you intend to share with the community should be hosted on Github and Github only.

That is ironic. This GitLab project couldn't even host itself yet: https://github.com/gitlabhq/gitlabhq

Or I could just be wrong, that their goal could simply as if they don't want people to share code with GitLab.

...or that they simply considers github to have a more robust server infrastructure?

...or it is easier to cone github if you actually use github.