That would've been my exact reaction while reading this. Good thing I have no large projects on Github.
Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.
From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.
There's no standard, of course, but [shameless plug] I've recently built SIT (https://sit.fyi) -- a tool that allows to collaborate on information in a decentralized, "true serverless" manner. Its first application is (duh!) issue tracking and it has been operational since almost day zero and SIT itself is using it. There's even a GitHub -> SIT import tool (pre-release)
Now, what's also great (did I mention "shameless"?) about the approach used in SIT is that while you can use it with Git (and this is how I've been using it so far), it does not depend on Git's structures but just files -- so it can be easily carried over to whatever might replace Git in a decade.
I've just been thinking: If one manages issues within a separate git repo -- couldn't we also store pull requests this way? I've always been very impressed by how good `git diff` and `git apply` work together, so theoretically, one should just be able to store the result of `git diff master...HEAD` in a new issue. The rest sounds like a tooling problem...
Well, I guess Gitlab would be happy about the new customers. If they're clever, they'll work on some tools to easen the transition.
From this perspective, Git has made some fundamental things right: Because it only functions as a decentralized system, it strongly reduces lock-in. In the case of Github, you "only" had to port over issues and pull requests. Imagine how great it would be if there was a standard way to save issues in a git repo[1] that was supported by pretty much every provider.
[1]: Such as https://pythonhosted.org/pyditz/