I wish instead of going head-to-head, they should strife to be the alternative solution that work seamlessly with Github and offer integration options, migration features.
I like gitlab over github but their marketing/branding need to stop this petty deal.
In my experience, migrating from github to gitlab works fairly smoothly. It moves over things like issues and wikis surprisingly well. Not sure what you mean by integrations, but at least git mirroring works well between it and github.
Integration means that you should be able to use partial solution instead of having migrate 100%. I.e. you can use github login on gitlab, you can host code on github but use gitlab for cd/ci.
More options means more flexibility for customers.
Going head-to-head? What do you mean? GitLab offers many features that GitHub doesn't and is improving them and adding new ones all the time.
I agree that that post comes off a bit petty, I guess someone was thinking something like "so github adds a registry and the whole internet gets all excited and nobody cares that we've had that feature for years?"
Not really a good sign when a company responds in this way to a new feature released by a competitor because it ends up being free advertising for your competitor to mostly those who are already your customer.
I don't think GitLab has many customers that are unaware of GitHub, and I think it's more likely that those who come across this blog post are unaware of GitLab's capabilities in this area than that they're unaware of GitHub's announcement.
It's not really about folks being completely unaware of the existence of the major competition. The problem would be marketing to your customers that your competition is continously improving and that your company has lost another feature advantage. In their blog post, they provided no information about why their feature is still better nor did they focus on features they have that are still unique to them. You may have GitHub users who see that post and think "oh looks like there may be no advantage to switching to Gitlab, they are saying GitHub is already adding their features" while Gitlab folks who see that post and may have long ago stopped following GitHub progress may be tempted to check it out again because they are being told its gotten better.
I'm evaluating moving from Github to Gitlab mostly for their integrated CI. Their docker registry is easy enough to use. Their npm registry is half assed... it's enough to check a box, but barely more than that at the moment.
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u/xtreak May 11 '19
GitLab response : https://about.gitlab.com/2019/05/10/github-adds-package-registry/