Microsoft acquiring GitHub

[floris]

@Martin_Guenther

Also GitLab seems to be a better solution for managing large scale centralized open source projects such as GNOME.

The reason GNOME switched to GitLab was ideological, not technical. In the article you linked, they said that: “We had a set of hard requirements, with the most important one being that it must be free software, ideally not only in license but also in spirit.” There is nothing wrong with that, and I’m a strong open source advocate myself, but one should keep in mind that there is nothing technical about Gitlab that makes it somehow better for large-scale repositories. Aside from that, ROS does not have any monolithic large-scale repositories.

Even if GitLab itself gets acquired at some point, the platform could be forked and continued independently. Another major benefit of GitLab is that it can be self-hosted.

For self-hosted repositories, there is nothing better than Gitlab IMO. At the institute I work at, we use a big self-hosted Gitlab instance for all our private repositories. However, that all is irrelevant to the question posed in this thread, which is whether we should switch from github.com to gitlab.com (i.e., the cloud-hosted Gitlab instance) right now. The answer to that question is “no” in my opinion.

I agree with you in spirit, but I think it should be noted that GitLab is not just a self-hosted GitHub, but also offers built-in features such as CI/CD which in GitHub you would use external services to manage.

Just to make it clear, I’m not advocating for moving any ROS project to GitLab. Like you said, maintainers can already decide where to host their packages. Maintainers also seem to have a lot of freedom in deciding how to organize their work. I do believe GitLab has some features which benefit centralized projects, but ROS is not a centralized project so I don’t know whether those features are useful for maintainers of ROS packages.