EthicHub Developer Update: GitLab Migration

Hey there! It’s Khalid, Product and Project Manager in EthicHub. And I’m happy to communicate with the community for the first time :)

We’ve been quite busy the last months launching the Alpha Version of our platform (If you didn’t try it yet, what are you waiting for? :) )! And we are aware that we still have a lot of work ahead to deliver a secure and successful crowdlending platform. However, to achieve this, we will probably need the help of the community! Thus, we will do our best to communicate more about our progress and plans.

So let’s get started!

Our first news update is that we decided to migrate our repositories from Github to Gitlab.

Why Gitlab?
I am sure the first thing the majority of you will think about is “Microsoft Github purchase”… Well, if you did, then you’re not completely wrong! Let’s make it clear: We have nothing against Microsoft and their business model, as we are also using many of their products. But we just don’t think open source communities should be in the hand of big corporations with the power to play a big centralized role in the ecosystem (And you know how much love we got for centralization…).

This being said, this wasn’t the only reason. We tried to be as pragmatic and objective as possible during the decision-making process. So here are the main reasons we found after a quick benchmark:

Built-in CI/CD for free: CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous delivery. It was possible in Github as well, but only using third-parties’ CI/CD, while it’s included for free in Gitlab
Collaboration features: GitLab allows some cooler features for time tracking and project management. Which will make us all work more efficiently! In addition to this, there are no limits for public and private repositories and collaborators.
Gitlab is Free Software: Well… this is more a philosophical reason! Our developers are strong advocates of Free Software and they managed to convert the rest of the team to their religion! :)
Super Duper easy migration process: Considering the Microsoft purchase and all the reasons above, the only reason for us to reconsider the migration would have been a “super complicated migration process”… But Gitlab did a great job on this. You can basically migrate/import all your projects in few minutes (hours if you count all the checks to make sure everything is there)