And I hope ours does too. We're on Gitlab with runners on AWS at the moment, and the overhead is huge. Thousands of working hours spent on setting up and maintaining the infrastructure (even if it's code and probably a fraction of what our own datacenter would involve), millions in costs, hundreds of jobs spinning up to do jobs.

But also, many hours spent building jobs and the like that are off-the-shelf on Github Actions.

This is the main issue though, it feels like doing anything but what the largest companies offer just costs more time and money. It reminds me of the decades long push to move away from Microsoft, only for e.g. the office 365 offering to show up and make everyone's (software, account management) work easier and cheaper, forever.

Yeah I can't see a better alternative to GitHub.

OSS can build truly incredible libraries and frameworks. User facing products? ehhhhh not so much.

GitHub has gotten worse over the years but it's not like there's some gold standard open source alternative. And remember, early GH was filled with a pretty amazing group of developers and open source advocates.

If the counter is that, instead of buying github, we could have invested in building some other tool, well, that's not how this works. People need to build what the company is actually building for its users.

> DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.

And the companies with specific needs (funnily enough, at the other end of the cash spectrum) or have a lower internal cost than the products out there.

There's more of them out there than we give credit for I think. In particular, running one's own stack on the corner seldom makes the news.

This is the irony of software engineering. This is how a lot of bad software gets written too.

Lots of businesses can't put sensitive work product onto external servers. You just don't work for them.

> Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub

Interesting, my experience has been the opposite. 99% of companies I've seen self host their VCS, it has been Gitlab (with some rare sel-hosted GitHub Enterprise everyone seems to hate, and the very rare Bitbucket).

To be fair most of them started with it when Gitlab was really really ahead, features wise. The gap has somewhat closed, but Gitlab is still a superior product IMO. Just the fact that you can have an actual organisational structure, and move it around, and share variables/configs between groupings, beats anything GitHub have to offer which is slightly nicer than GitLab.

How does Forgejo compare here? Would it be better or worse than Gitlab? How about a self-hosted Sourcehut instance?

Blender does it

LOL. You can do GitLab hosting with High Availability at a very professional level without needing a huge team.

> later moved to GitHub

And had to live with their constant outages :)