Neat! Is there a way for me to serve those files so people can then use my repository as the authoritative source? I see that they still have the concepts of remotes, so maybe things are getting there?
git lfs push should work to push files new to the repo, but I'm not sure it works to push files that exists in the repo but are new to the server (because it is a new remote)
to us, things like git lfs encourage us to ensure there is an open source package that supports it, to keep the d in dvcs, so we'll add support to our community edition too
Gitlab giving me an alternative is awesome and commendable. If I will be able to clone a repo from github including all of the lfs then push it all to gitlab that would be better than nothing! Is github contributing to your effort to have an lfs server that is open and free?
Let me give an example of one way it hurts the existing git ecosystem. Someone decides to include their external source dependencies for their project as tarballs using lfs (which is probably dumb and not the use case that lfs is trying to support, but people will do it nonetheless). Now I want to mirror that repository inside of my companies firewall which hosts its git repositories using just git over ssh. Without lfs, I would just do 'git clone --mirror && git push --mirror' and I internally have a mirror that is easy to keep up-to-date, is dependable, supports extending the source in a way that is easy to contribute back, etc..
Now what options do I have with lfs (outside of gitlab)? Create a tarball with all the source +lfs in it? Create a new repository that doesn't use lfs and commit the files to that? Each of these is less than ideal and makes contributing back to the project harder.
Imagine instead a world where this happened: Github.com announces that they are adding large file support to git. These large files will be using an alternative object storage, but the existing git, http, and ssh protocols will be extended to support fetching these new objects. When support for it lands in the git mainline repository, suddenly everyone will be able to take advantage of it, regardless of how they choose to host their repositories!
I admire gitlab for creating an open source server implementation. I just wish that github would have done it a different way that would have been better for the overall git community (not just github users).
If it was fully integrated with git, you could do 'git fetch --all-objects-ever' and your repository could then be cloned and fetched from.