Why I will be moving my private source code repositories away from GitHub

In case you’ve been living under a rock, it was announced on Monday that Microsoft as acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion. For various reasons, this has upset open source developers around the world.

Since then there has been a lot of discussion online about the pros and cons of this event. While I do feel that a lot of the complaints are probably coming from a vocal minority who are decidedly anti Microsoft (no doubt angrily typing their responses on Apple products, the irony) I also agree that this is perhaps not the best news for the open source movement in general.

Personally I will be moving my private (and possibly later public) git repositories over to GitLab and I thought it might be interesting to share my reasons why, if for no other reason than they were referred to as ‘a far sight more measured than most of the opinions about this that I’ve seen so far!‘. I feel like the world could use more measured opinions about popular or unpopular topics in general, so here goes:

1. GitLab is open source, nuff said!
2. While I don’t disagree that Microsoft has, under the leadership of it’s current CEO Staya Nadella, done a lot to prove that it now supports open source, something that the company was vehemently against in previous years, I feel it’s important to note that this change has only happened since Nadella took over as CEO 2014. This means that the company shift is directly as a result of the mindset of it’s CEO and that CEO will not be in place forever. The next leader of the company may not share Nadella’s love of open source.
3. Personally, I don’t like the fact that any large company is in control of the world’s largest open source, code hosting platform. Did Microsoft really have to acquire GitHub to help it grow and improve? I would have been more impressed if Nadella had simply become a member of the GitHub board of directors and helped raise capital in order to support and grow GitHub, instead of outright buying it. Interestingly, this is a path that Matt Mullenweg took with GitLab about a year ago.
4. GitLab has some cool features that GitHub doesn’t built right in, like Continuous Integration & Deployment on the free plan right up to Epics, Roadmaps and License Management on the top pricing tiers. They really seem to be building a seamless, integrated product for modern software developers and I want to support them in this cause.

I was already paying GitHub $7 a month to host my private repositories, so switching to GitLab’s $4 a month pricing plan will be a nice little saving each month. Not that I have to, as GitLab, like BitBucket, supports private repositories on the free tier.

And yes, I do know that if you were a GitLab user when a member of their staff managed to delete a database by accident you probably weren’t happy with them and moved on. I’m willing to give them a second chance.