Earlier this week, Microsoft announced that it had purchased GitHub. Since then, competing code hosting services have experienced a dramatic increase in usage as developers who are unhappy about the acquisition look for a new place to host their code. GitLab has seen more than 100,000 repositories migrate from GitHub since Monday when the deal was confirmed. Atlassian’s BitBucket has also reported an increase, although the company declined to share hard numbers.
In an attempt to capitalize on disgruntled feelings among developers, GitLab has made its premium services free for educational institutions and open source projects. GitLab Ultimate (self-hosted) and GitLab Gold (cloud-based) are both now free for qualified users; however, the free offerings do not include support, which is available at a discounted rate.
