GitLab acquires Gitorious [LWN.net]

GitLab acquires Gitorious

Posted Mar 4, 2015 10:06 UTC (Wed) by moltonel (subscriber, #45207)
In reply to: GitLab acquires Gitorious by dakas
Parent article: GitLab acquires Gitorious

According to the gitorious CEO, they were *not* able to run the free version of gitorious on their server : "Due to decreased income from on-premises customers, running the free Gitorious.org was no longer sustainable."

Sadly it seems that "FLOSS + network effect" is not enough to get enough people on the platform to sustain the company, and they feel the need to add proprietary perks.

That said, FLOSS gitlab is plenty good enough to run a service available to both in-house and external contributors. That's what we use in my company.

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GitLab acquires Gitorious

Posted Mar 4, 2015 10:38 UTC (Wed) by hunger (subscriber, #36242) [Link]

I would not write off "FLOSS + network effect" yet, just because of gitorious.

You need to have a competitive product and gitorious just did not have that. The one advantage Gitorious had over github was the license, which is not enough to attract users. And without users no community, and without community no contributions.

An other show-stopper for building a community was the lack of communication. The blog worked best for me, but even there were really infrequent updates (check out blog.gitorious.org: There is not even a mention of gitlab at this time, last post being from Dec. 4th).

Without a community sharing the development burden it is no surprise that gitorious failed to keep innovating. That makes it impossible to keep up with the competition, making gitorious fall back even further.

GitLab acquires Gitorious

Posted Mar 8, 2015 6:17 UTC (Sun) by clacke (guest, #69542) [Link] (1 responses)

That's a misinterpretation. They weren't earning enough money selling on-premise services that they could afford providing an online service free of charge.

I asked gitlab/gitorious directly: gitorious.org is/was tunning the same AGPLv3 codebase as everyone else.

https://twitter.com/rolfb/status/574264361163825152

GitLab acquires Gitorious

Posted Nov 20, 2016 11:13 UTC (Sun) by catalinuxboie (guest, #112452) [Link]

Hi!

RocketGit will try the same path as Gitorious: AGPLv3 + free hosting (public AND private).
Let's see if anyone cares...

Disclaimer: I am the main author.
Site: https://rocketgit.com