Gitorious

» see gitorious.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

gitorious was on my radar the whole time i was learning git, which for me was the years when git itself stopped being a linux-kernel thing and became a normal tool you were expected to know. it was the name that came up right next to github in every comparison. i read about it and knew what it stood for, and like most people i opened a github account instead and never looked back. that quiet default is the whole story of gitorious.

it launched in january 2008 out of norway, a few months ahead of github, and it was built on a principle. the entire platform was free software, released under the agpl, so you could run your own gitorious server and host projects on your own terms. for the free-software crowd that mattered, and for a while gitorious was where a lot of serious open-source work lived, from qt to parts of the ruby world.

the trouble was never the code, it was the experience. github treated hosting as a product to be made pleasant, with a slick interface and pull requests that felt like a conversation. gitorious treated hosting as infrastructure to be made correct. correct lost.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

at its core gitorious did what you would expect. it gave a project a home and a clean way to accept contributions, and it let organizations mirror the whole thing behind their own firewall because the source was open. that self-hostable part was its real gift, and it is the part that outlived the website.

~ the decline ~

by the early 2010s github had won the mindshare so completely that being on gitorious started to read as a statement rather than a choice. ownership passed to powow as in 2013, and momentum kept draining toward the place where everyone else already was. a hosting service with no new users is a maintenance bill waiting to be canceled.

~ the inheritance ~

gitlab bought gitorious in march 2015 and gave the users until the end of may to migrate, then shut gitorious.org down on 1 june. the archive team grabbed the domain and kept the public repositories readable, so the code did not vanish, it just stopped moving. gitlab, itself an open-core answer to github, was the fitting heir. the idea gitorious argued for, that your git host should be software you can run yourself, is the idea gitlab sells to this day.

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