Gitness actually launched in 2012 under the name Drone, with a focus on continuous integration. So Gitness has a very strong, mature pipeline engine that is also very popular in the Gogs and Gitea community (Gitness is backward compatible with any Drone yaml). Of course, this is just our initial launch which is a very important milestone, but we have a lot of feature gaps and a lot of work to do to make our Code Hosting solution a more interesting replacement. Stay tuned.
Yes. Dark mode is coming. Code Snippet management is a great suggestion and we will absolutely pick this up. Thanks for testing it out. Hit us up in our Slack channel if you have any future suggestions or if there is anything we can do to help.
Very possible. SourceHut is great and seems to be most popular with developers and open source teams (although I'm sure they also have corporate users too). We are more focused on companies and enterprises. These are different segments of the market with different needs. The former also tends to have higher user counts with lower average deal size, while the latter has lower user counts with very high average deal size.
With that being said, Gitness is a rebranding of Drone, which has 10,000+ active installations so I would say we are off to a pretty good start!
I see Gitness as the evolution of Drone. We are using the Drone pipeline engine and a ton of Drone code under the hood, but we are also adding Code hosting capabilities. And at some point, when you upgrade to the next major version of Drone, you will actually be upgrading to Gitness.
I should mentioned that we will never force you to host your code on Gitness. You will be able to use Gitness Pipelines with other code hosting providers, including Gitea.
I think the challenge with starting a new project is that it would result in Drone feeling completely abandoned because there would be zero investment going forward. We want to bring the community with us. I really do think Harness is breathing new life into the Drone project with this rebranding (12 full time developers and counting) and I am really excited to see where we are a year from now.
PS glad to hear you like Drone. I hope you will consider testing out Gitness at some point and letting us know what you think. It is still early days, but the team is making improvements daily. Hit us up in our Slack channel if there is anything we can do to help.
Nothing cynical about that statement. We definitely want to preserve the star counts! But as the founder of Drone, and Head of Product for Gitness, I see Gitness as the next major version of Drone. Gitness is built on the Drone pipeline engine and uses significant amounts of Drone code. And in the coming months, when you upgrade to the latest version of Drone you will get Gitness. So to me, they are one and the same.
I run the Gitness Project at Harness (also Founded Drone, on which this is based). It was mentioned by another Harness employee, but we have been dogfooding Gitness internally for the past 6 months. The project is entirely self-hosted at this point.
There was a lot of discussion internally about what message it would send if we also published the source code on GitHub. I was very adamant that we need to host on GitHub because this is where Open Source collaboration happens today, and we need to meet developers where they are today.
No shame here.
It is important to remember that Gitea is a very popular project and is a success by any measure with tens of thousands of installs, and they host on GitHub. I don't think that detracts from how awesome their product is. GitLab also hosted on GitHub in the early days to grow their community.
I definitely hope that one day, developers will love Gitness as much as they love GitHub, and they will choose Gitness to host their Open Source communities. But that will take a lot of time and a lot of work. We are here for it, but today is just a humble day 1 launch. We have years of work ahead of us.
This is probably my fault. Internally at Harness I have been hyping this launch as a "once in a decade" event. That unfortunately got translated into "first in a decade" when it hit the press. I do think the launch of a new, major open source Source Control system with kind of investment (12 full time engineers and counting) is a rare event, but I do wish it was worded differently. Nothing we can do about it now!
Edit: if you have feature requests, let us know!