Timeline:

2008: Github launched

2008: Bitbucket launched

2010: Atlassian purchases bitbucket, makes private repos free

2011: Gitlab launched

2014: Gogs (Gitea's predecessor) first public release

2016: Gitea forks from Gogs

So at the very least, bitbucket was established and gitlab was around

And even before Github, there was Trac [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trac]

Trac is without a doubt the most frustrating product I’ve ever had the misfortune of working with.

I don’t even know why. Just seeing the interface rubs me entirely the wrong way.

Personal choice but indeed Trac is very nice and is still used by high profile projects like Django (especially supporting ticket triage) and Twisted Matrix.

Indeed fossil-scm [1], has same interface as Trac (in my view partly inspired by it). Have used Trac for a long time, so can't complain, it works well, its simple and flexible.

[1] https://fossil-scm.org

I mean, if we're counting Trac as the same, despite the drastically different UI and project-first rather than code-first focus, then we also need to count Sourceforge, which was open source in its first (2000) and third (2009) incarnations.

I'm not sure when Git support was initially added to Trac, but TracGit 1.0 released in 2012.[0]

[0] https://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracGit

Yes, that's when it was included to Trac 1.0 as a built-in plugin. Before that, it was a 3rd party plugin you have to install yourself. I remember using it before 2010 and I'm pretty sure the plugin pre-dates github.

Nice timeline. One thing to point out though is Bitbucket only supported Mercurial up until October 2011.

Gitlab is great, but it also is pretty resource hungry. I opted for Gitea for that reason, so it would be viable on the cheapest Linode server option, and I've mostly been satisfied with it, thus far.

Same, there were a number of GitHub like services you could self host but gitea stood out to me as the easiest to install and maintain. A lot of the other options I looked at required multiple daemons, a full database, etc. Gitea can use a full database but works great with SQLite also.