How many distros now have their own GitLab instance? I know Alpine, Arch, and Debian do. Any others?
Plus Freedesktop, GNOME, U-Boot, and probably more I am not aware of.
At this point, even if GitLab decided to close down their CE offering, I think there is enough momentum in the community to keep it going (at least for a little while).
Plugging in for GitHub gets a score of about 90%. GitLab is in the mid 30%'s. (Assuming Arch is keeping a backup mirror of the bugtracker, etc on a private instance somewhere.)
That seems good enough to not bother with actually hosting it yourself. I'd rather they spend volunteer time on stuff other than applying security patches to a giant beast of a web service.
A lot of effort is spent on packaging the stuff we need for our own infrastructure so we can run it in prod. Gitlab is one of these exceptions but generally it's been working well for us.
VLC is also using their selfhosted Gitlab. And just as on the Arch gitlab, they had to turn off autoregistration due to spam and are resorting to manual validation instead. Sad!
yeah but many FOSS orgs are run in a way that they state in their own bylaws that they would not use proprietary infrastructure and communication tools in order not to scare away Free Software purists. Then they get overrun by spammers and the whole project might get laid on ice because of it.
Plus Freedesktop, GNOME, U-Boot, and probably more I am not aware of.
At this point, even if GitLab decided to close down their CE offering, I think there is enough momentum in the community to keep it going (at least for a little while).