I'm sure everyone has inspirations, but a quick look at GitLab and GitHub makes it clear that the two have diverged considerably in terms of design.
Lastly, we do believe that we have much to learn in terms of design and UX. We'd love to receive contributions and concrete feedback that help us with this.
As another side question, suppose I sign up for a GitLab account and have repositories there. Is it possible to import / move them easily if I later decide to host my own instance? I noticed that you said it's easy to migrate from Bitbucket / Github, but can repos be moved between GitLab instances easily?
> As another side question, suppose I sign up for a GitLab account and have repositories there. Is it possible to import / move them easily if I later decide to host my own instance? I noticed that you said it's easy to migrate from Bitbucket / Github, but can repos be moved between GitLab instances easily?
If you have a large amount of repositories, you can import them directly, rather than simply pushing them to the new server. Of course, we're happy to help you with this if needed.
Thanks to the GitHub designers for saving GitLab a lot of work, I guess? Most of the GitLab design, almost all of the abstractions and interaction patterns, and even some of the UI text comes straight out of GitHub.
I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but GitLab feels like the webapp version of one of those GPL clones of a Microsoft app.