Hello all,

Composr development has just moved from GitHub to GitLab.

GitHub has served us well for many years, but we had many strong reasons to make this move:

1. GitHub was bought out by Microsoft 11 months ago. While Microsoft today is in many ways a positive force for Open Source development, in the past it did a number of very hostile things towards the Open Source community, and to its competition in general. It does not feel appropriate to grant Microsoft such a dominant role, and possible position of power, over the development of Open Source software.
2. While GitHub helps serves many Open Source projects, it has never itself been Open Source. GitLab is, however. It seems a basically consistency that in the Free Software movement we should be promoting a full stack that is Open Source, rather than letting our energies (promotion, feedback) serve those who would rather things remain closed. If we don't stick by our principles, making a series of easy pragmatic choices, the Free Software movement suffers by a thousand cuts.
3. GitLab is a really excellent platform, with a lot of very exciting features we may start using in the future.
4. GitLab allows free private repositories, meaning ocProducts developers can manage private client projects on the same platform as Composr itself.

In practical terms, the transition to GitLab is simple. We have simply uploaded the existing git repositories to the site (with full history), and repointed our clones (personal development copies & deployment copies) to point to it. The user interface is very comfortable to those familiar with GitHub.

Towards the progression of Open Source - the Composr team.