As a person who recently discovered gitlab and has been trying to push it (make it popular at work, and possibly use it to replace github, and encourage people to use it), this is amazing.
Installing Gitlab was definitely one of the painpoints, having an executable that just works is amazing
What are people's thoughts on open software projects like this eating into github licensing money? I feel guilty sometimes pushing gitlab since I really like github as a company (and want them to thrive)
Github is a great example of a company that built closed source tools on top of open source ones and made money. They are not a non profit and aren't contributing a lot back to the tools they make money off of so it makes no sense to feel bad.
GitLab B.V. CEO here, thanks for promoting GitLab at work. I'm sorry to hear the installation was a painpoint. Have you tried our packages? It is a single file that installs in two minutes.
I recently installed the CE package and it was a good experience overall. I had put it in a VM though, because it didn't like my postgresql installation ( https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt ).
I absolutely love the product. The install guide is fantastic, I don't know if that can be any better than it already is. The thing is, I'm a little paranoid about downloading & installing random binaries on our computers at work (I work in a very IP-sensitive company), so I generally go for source-builds.
I've actually been writing a fabric script to automate the entire install, believe it or not (the whole thing might be an exercise in futility, since people could just download the package), and I've installed gitlab enough times that I'm not really worried about it -- so at this point it's not a huge problem.
Installing Gitlab was definitely one of the painpoints, having an executable that just works is amazing
There were already other options that were very simple to install and upgrade, such as Gitblit and Gitbucket. At work we are using Gitblit. It provides all the functionality you'd expect, and one of the nice advantages is that it can store tickets in an orphan branch, so that you have these in git too.
I know this is silly and probably more than a little undeserved, but I stay away from java, JARs and WARs like the plague. I barely use Java for anything anymore, and I know 8 is great, but I'm just not comfortable running that/taking care of it.
I've actually rolled up my sleeves and written some login adapters (for internal use) in gitlab, and I'm much more comfortable writing ruby in rails than I would ever be writing Java. Again, this is probably a stupid opinion, but until I see the Java light, I don't think I'll be back to it.
Also, gitblit looks nowhere as good as gitlab (or even gitorious) does. Neither does gitbucket -- they don't have the polish that I see on other solutions... Yeah it's a really fickle point, but I want to reward groups that also prioritize design/visuals in their projects.
Installing Gitlab was definitely one of the painpoints, having an executable that just works is amazing
What are people's thoughts on open software projects like this eating into github licensing money? I feel guilty sometimes pushing gitlab since I really like github as a company (and want them to thrive)