> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.
While I agree with most of your point, I'd suggest that being self-hosted is a fairly major draw for a certain group of people. There's a lot of overlap with the anti-MS cohort, but it's not exclusive. Most of the uses I've seen of GitLab in companies is those who stick it on a cheap VM and never pay for it.
GitHub has had a self-hosted offering in the past, the current availability is... cloudy, looks discontinued, they're trying to move people back online. It was always way more expensive though, targeting a completely different market to GitLab self-hosting.
While I agree with most of your point, I'd suggest that being self-hosted is a fairly major draw for a certain group of people. There's a lot of overlap with the anti-MS cohort, but it's not exclusive. Most of the uses I've seen of GitLab in companies is those who stick it on a cheap VM and never pay for it.
GitHub has had a self-hosted offering in the past, the current availability is... cloudy, looks discontinued, they're trying to move people back online. It was always way more expensive though, targeting a completely different market to GitLab self-hosting.