GitLab earned their market position by offering free private repos. They leveraged that position to get the funding to massively ramp up their enterprise features while GitHub was burdened with thousands of open source users. Now GitLab is cashing in and I don't blame them. Their product is excellent. It's basically an all-in-one package for small to mid tech orgs.
Given the rise of Sourcehut as some people's new goto and Github finally offering container registry, it seems like a good time to pull that trigger too. I as a whole like GitLab as an all-in-one solution.
I love Sourcehut, but Sourcehut's only competitive right now in the indie/free software enthusiast market. I doubt Gitlab views them as a major threat.
Much like Sourceforge isn’t and Bitbucket is not the same sort of competitor or threat as a couple of years ago. The private version that is sold (Stash?) could be though.
It's not the best comparison. Gitlab is VC-backed, whereas Sourcehut aims for slow, sustainable growth. Plus, the UX decisions of Sourcehut are so drastically different from Gitlab/Github that it doesn't threaten existing customers very much.
