So many are leaving the most famous collaboration software! GitHub has sink into Microsoft stream and as we know, that's the water where even the Octocat can not swim. It is actually surprising how many open-source projects have trusted in a close source platform. Meanwhile, 2000+ people are twitting #MovingToGitLab, the hashtag promoted by GitLab with 75% discount for an yearly access to they service. Sytse Sijbrandij, the GitLab CEO has even raised an issue, "T-shirts for #movingtogitlab before it was cool", being cool before it was cool is cool indeed.
Alternatives
In fact, it is a good time for marketing, and I do not have any problem with making good business decisions. I am specially happy for free-software/open-source projects making good business decisions, as it means, more people using software giving them freedom, which means a little bit better world. GitLab is a good decision. However, I see this moment as good opportunity for rethinking how we meant internet to be, how we want our data to be stored. Do we really want all the code to be in hands of one service provider?
As more and more people are going to move to Git hosting alternatives, I wanna remind you how cool choices we actually do have now among open-source replacements for GitHub.
GitGud.io
Technology: Ruby
GitGud is created by cool developers called Sepphire. Those guys seem to be dedicated to the mission of delivering fair replacements for monopolized markets. Among they applications you can find GitGud.tv, replacements for Twitch, or Tavrn.gg, kinda Slack but also with some Twitter-like functionality. The core of GitGud is a fork of GitLab code, but Sepphire is not charging for any intern features, instead they totally depend on users donations. For people migrating from GitHub the interesting feature may be easy interface for importing GitHub (as well as few others provider's) projects.
Gogs.io
Technology: Go
Gogs have pretty minimal interface, but it is now on really early stage of development with version labeled 0.11. You can find there however most of the expected features, like issues, groups, repository migration etc. If you like GO, Gogs is also an "painless self-hosted Git service" you can run for your group, company, or for open-source community from source or binary. They support a lot of platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and ARM.
GitBlit.com
Technology: Java
I guess there is a fair amount of people who feel good in Java as that is the language they teach at the universities now. If you are one of them, GitBlit is probably a good ecosystem for you to use your environment, tweak around, maybe do some commits. Besides an online interface for hosting and managing your repositories there is also some desktop tools like GitBlit GO (a single-stack solution, with integrated Jetty server, which replace you all every-day tools you are using locally while working with Git repositories).
GiTea.io
Technology: Go
GitTea is not just a Git collaboration's software but actually way for running self-hosted Git service yourself. You can always use try.GiTea.io, however better don't host there something important, for now the developers warns it can always go down, and repositories cold not be restored. Anyways, service works awesome, it is fast, lightweight and easy to use. All you need, to make it work, is to run a binary file which you can download from they website. It runs at Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, ARM, and more. I try to run it on my Raspberry Pi 2 and it worked just fine.
Nothing is good for everything so I hope this helps to choose how you want to collaborate with your team. Remember that free software are programmed and supported by community. Dive in and make the software of your choice work as you want it to. If you are using some already, let me know about your experience, for sure there are some interesting features that I didn't mentioned in this article!
Vitae
If you come all down to this paragraph, I will give a late note about myself. I don't want to bore you with an standard introduction, in stead I prefer go straightforward in to the subject. But if any of you wander, call my Siery. If you like to follow my commits, I gonna be writing about free software/hardware tech news + tutorials, mostly about web oriented technology but also about art n' games. I will read all the comments and try to answer them. If you like to ask me a question or start a conversation, drop me a mail. You may notice that I am not a native English speaker, I don't mind if someone correct me thou :).
Daniel <Siery> Sierpiński