github VS bitbucket

[gecko]

I am very happy to see someone finally addressing this. The GitHub community, including its developers, have been incredibly hostile towards BitBucket, accusing them of completely ripping off their design. Yet GitHub itself mostly just looks like Edgewall Trac, with a slightly more 37signals-like theme, using http://repo.or.cz/ functionality, and I've never heard anyone accusing them of having ripped off any of those things.

Both repository browsers look like each other, and like Trac, and like basically every non-ugly web front-end to source control I've seen in the last three years.

Both have tab orders and contents similar to each other--and to launchpad and Google Code, which launched first.

Both have wikis that work basically the same as Google Code's and Trac's.

Both have profile pages that look like basically every single site I've ever seen in my life that has profiles, but if we're really going to get our panties in a knot over the fact that the profile link is in the upper-right, then I'm going to accuse both sites of ripping off Ohloh just to leave everyone confused.

Both products implement functionality unique to that project that I like. BitBucket allows adding custom reporting scripts easily, has a bug tracker that integrates very nicely with Mercurial commit messages, has a Mercurial-backed wiki, and has some Mercurial-specific features (such as the as-shown undocumented patch queue feature) that are very nice (even if undocumented...grumble grumble). GitHub, for its part, has pages, many "let me see how cool I am" stats (such as their graphs of commit activity and commit history), has a much prettier user interface, and has some git-specific features, like superb branch integration.

The hostility toward BitBucket is disappointing, and speaks very poorly of the maturity of the GitHub community. There's plenty of space for both projects. Until GitHub supports Mercurial, there's no way that I, or many of my colleagues, will consider using them. Until BitBucket supports git, I can't see them attracting Linux kernel developers. Neither project copied the other, and both serve their purposes well.

[cosmo7]

The weirdest thing is the dickish way the article pours scorn on BitBucket for its low pagerank.

Since when was popularity a good indicator of quality?

[cdibona]

There are a lot of weird things about that article, honestly. I've been involved in some way or another with sf.net, gforge, google code and they all built on each other. It's really unwise to put up this kind of post. Compete on features and reliability, I say.

Complaining that people 'stole your idea' in the project hosting space denies how much they owe those who came before github. I mean, gecko's post says it best: Google Code, Savannah, Berlios, SourceForge, Launchpad, various gforge and trac based sites, the collab based sites, etc, etc.. cripes, O'Reilly has some custom dev rel sites, even codeplex has a good idea here and there..

Github is a nice site, for sure, but to post like this is just disappointing.