One of the biggest draws of Github (to me) is that it's one central place for me to go for a wide array of projects that I work with, and where a lot of people I know can host their code to share with the large community of developers already on Github.
By using Gitlab on your own hosting, you lose all of that convenience of having everything in one place. Imagine that every time you want to contribute to a project, you have recreate yet another user account, upload all of your SSH keys again, and more. And then further imagine that you want to fork and work on repos from multiple projects that all have their own Gitlab instances, and now checking on your projects requires visiting N different sites to get the same information that you already get from a single login to Github.
Now I'm just as big of a fan of open source as the next person, but having a single central place to visit for projects is a Good Thing, and IMO Github has proven time and again that they actually care about the open source community as much as we do, and have done so much to foster communication and interaction between developers that their contributions are far more important to me than the value of having my code repositories hosted on an open source platform.
I agree, and I think GitHub is a fantastic resource for open-source projects, but it's a bit of a lobster trap in the sense that its existence lessons the need for an open-source alternative, but then locks you in to a paid model once you need private repositories.
What we should be looking for is an open-source project that allows people to keep their own projects private on their existing hosting, and allows easy sync with github for public projects.
By using Gitlab on your own hosting, you lose all of that convenience of having everything in one place. Imagine that every time you want to contribute to a project, you have recreate yet another user account, upload all of your SSH keys again, and more. And then further imagine that you want to fork and work on repos from multiple projects that all have their own Gitlab instances, and now checking on your projects requires visiting N different sites to get the same information that you already get from a single login to Github.
Now I'm just as big of a fan of open source as the next person, but having a single central place to visit for projects is a Good Thing, and IMO Github has proven time and again that they actually care about the open source community as much as we do, and have done so much to foster communication and interaction between developers that their contributions are far more important to me than the value of having my code repositories hosted on an open source platform.