The Usual Suspects It's depressing to keep seeing, when the subject of git-backed public code-hosting comes up, the same two bad suggestions made over and over: GitHub (now owned/operated by Microsoft Corporation) is a proprietary and hosted commercial site with limited zero-dollar access granted to individuals. It appears to be extremely complex, convoluted code, but, because it's a hosted Software as a Service proprietary offering, nobody outside the company has even been able to see binaries, let alone source code. When you join the hordes of people hosting your software project repositories on GitHub, you are implicitly outsourcing custody of your code (but of course you would also have a local repo) to a corporate middleman that gets to collect information on you and your collaborators. GitLab is sometimes promoted as an alternative to GitHub, on the basis of it being open source (or at least the "community edition' is), but in practice basically nobody is likely to host a GitLab instance other than GitLab, Inc. -- because the codebase is ridiculously overcomplication and requires massive hardware resources to get even halfway tolerable performance and scaling, because it relies on Ruby on Rails. In consequence, the theoretical advantage that GitLab (community edition) is open source and can be self-hosted if desired is a mirage: You would probably be deterred by the hardware and administrative hassles required to run your own GitLab, which is why essentially nobody does. How Did This Blindspot Arise? It's pretty obvious how GitHub and GitLab became the only options commonly mentioned for git-backed code hosting: It's the familiar proprietary mindset, where it's taken as given that any alternative must have full feature parity with an overly complex, commercial proprietary option, e.g., only something that does literally everything GitHub does can be seemed an alternative to GitHub. But that's nonsense. All the Better Things gitolite gogs gitea gitorious? gitosis (asserted to be orphaned) Gerrit? Rietveld?