We're certainly growing, and I'll do everything I can to keep and increase the openness. We just made our strategy public https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/
I used bitbucket for a long time because it did the job and it provided private repos. But after I had to start looking for another job, many employers wanted to see my github profile.
I don't understand that as a criteria to be hired. I could see it as something to help show off, but shouldn't you as an employee be focusing on your company's codebase and not OSS products (unless there is some bug in the product you could fix that impacted your company)?
Maybe it's since I've always worked for companies with > 500 employees, but there is always a pile of work on the products I've worked on that there was little time to contribute externally.
Yes but many employers want to look at how many stars and forks your repo got on github. It's a nice metric to filter repos from candidates, it is not enough for sure but usually repos with tons of stars are considered a good signal and it allows employers to save time before they start looking at your code. Bitbucket doesn't have enough users to offer these kinds of interesting metrics unfortunately.
Wow, I've never seen that. I mean, people often like to see some kind of evidence of something you've worked on, and looking at someone's Github profile is an easy way to do that. But I've never heard of stars and forks being used as a crude filtering mechanism.
There are so many factors that go into whether or not a repo becomes popular, which aren't necessarily related to anything that reflects on the creator's merits as an engineering hire. I think you'd skew your candidate pool in a weird way if you leaned on these metrics too heavily. Honestly, I'd be curious to hear more about how it's used in hiring.
I'm not sure about your sampling of "many". I can count the number of interviews where my code was actually looked at on one hand; no doubt this is different for unicorn-type companies.
At any rate, enter the law of triviality. Making something simple that lots of people will understand is more likely to lead to more stars than something brilliant but complex, yet more indicative of development skill. This selects for gaming of the system and/or salesmanship; no doubt said employers will screech about a lack of "qualified" candidates before long.
Doesn't entirely solve the problem. But you could use multiple remotes. Still gives github power in terms of forks and stars, but your commits can be in many places. (and you can decide to do issues where you want)
While I fully agree, there's somewhat of a chicken-n-egg problem here though, because part of the profile shows contributions to other projects/repos, and that's more of a github thing, partly because their profile is designed differently to focus on that, and partly because there are just many more popular repos on github to begin with, so to contribute to those, an Atlasssian bitbucket profile doesn't help much, IF the primary intent is to 'show off' activity. Personally, I couldn't care less, I very much like the fact that Bitbucket offers free private repos, and I also prefer the tooling and cleaner UI of Bitbucket over github's.
I know others have waxed on the irony of the centralized role GitHub plays in a supposedly decentralized world of the DVCS that is git.
It would be cool if there were a Behance or even a Dribbble for programmers: a way for us to present our creations well but also easily in a host agnostic and semi or fully automated way.
Many of us or don't invest the effort necessary to maintain a work portfolio, unlike say design oriented fields where it's the norm. I think there could be something to it.
I think the clue was in "Truly Open", github isn't open source and is fairly expensive for small teams with private repo's (compared to bitbucket for example).
It's network effects are large but beyond that the product doesn't really do anything that others don't do just as well.
I am not the GP. To me, supporting GitHub is like supporting Jetbrains. I know they're good people. I know they're trying to do good things. However, I will always have a nagging feeling that wishes that the universe was somehow different and that their business model made it possible for them to freely and openly offer all their software.
I guess I can include things like Aerospike and even Gitlab in that group. I don't actively wish for them to succeed either. I am glad they exist and I actively use their products but I would not cheer for any of them.
Why do you put GitLab in that category? We're trying hard to freely and openly offer as much as we can. We do have an open core business model with a proprietary GitLab EE. But I wonder what you think we have to change.
Most larger companies will not use a third party cloud service to host their code like github.com. They want software to run locally on their own servers instead.
Github offers their software to enterprise customers to run on their own servers, but they traditionally have done a bad job doing it, at least relative to gitlab. Today, dozens of open projects and even closed ones are using personal gitlab instances, but since the ecosystem is more open on gitlab contributions come back in to make it a much more friendly tool to self-host.
Tons of larger companies favor gitlab for exactly that reason.
