That’s quite a cake, and a cheeky way to put themselves into the conversation. GitPod was and is a great service and I hope they find a sustainable path forward. Of course they can support other repo hosting services, but codespaces must have been a devastating blow. Best to them.
Geoff here from Gitpod. Codespaces launching is _awesome_ and we have been waiting for this moment for so long (over 2 years!) - now everyone is talking about improving developer experience.
GitPod so far has been a better experience, unless you get access to the actually 'paid' codespaces. Dealing with branches is a pain and a fork is impossible with the GitHub web editor. GitPod has a better real desktop experience in the browser. So I can see how this can help verify the experience they are after and confirms people want.
Personally been using GitPod a lot for mentoring and small workshops. (but also coder).
I’ll add an anecdote here that I’ve been really looking forward to playing with codespaces, and after seeing this post earlier today I spent a bit of time playing with gitpod, and reading up on comparisons. The clear pricing, prebuilds, and simple configuration has me leaning towards trialing gitpod for our team, I doubt I would have even been aware of it without the hype around codespaces.
Not affiliated with anything of this at all, but this can totally be a good thing for them.
GitHub entering this space gives them additional validation of the existence of a market for this kind of product and gives a lot of additional exposure to the product idea as a whole.
Even if they will now get a smaller percentage of developers using this kind of tool, the rise in the total number of developers using such tools will most probably make up for it.
The fact that free git platforms exists all around doesn't kill dozens of profitable alternatives.
The same could be said about codespaces. In fact, more people getting into codespaces is great for platforms like gitpod that can fight and offer solid alternative experiences.
The issue I believe for platforms like gitpod is to shift the mindset of many devs and companies that developing in a browser isn't merely a possibility but sometimes preferable.
Many of these platforms aren't really interested in shifting the _full_ development to the browser (although they could), since that would destroy the business position they're trying to establish for themselves. JS was created to be able to run in the browser, and yet most JS developers insist on still writing or relying on metatooling that can't actually run in the browser, even if that tooling is already written in JS! It requires downloading and installing an SDK/runtime† like NodeJS, or relying on a service provider like GitPod to provide the analog (read: run the same tools, but on machines that they own and that you can communicate with via the browser viewport).
If folks were really committed to improving the developer experience, then instead of what we do now and instead of what services like GitPod and Codespaces propose that we do, development would work like this:
1. Download the project source tree
2. Open README.html
3. Drag and drop the project source _onto_ README.html, which doesn't contain half explanations about setting up the appropriate development environment, so much as it contains an exact description (i.e. in executable code) of the build process—for the benefit of the machine that will perform it (along with these three steps—for the benefit of the human/prospective contributor)
Pull up a chair for a moment and consider that in this moment of time you are an open-source maintainer or a team-lead who has to review the pull-requests in the video below. Each browser tab is a brand new development environment, the git branch is automatically cloned, all dependencies are restored and your software has already been compiled.
Good? Now you understand what Gitpod is all about.
Pretty much the same here. It provides an easy view on the PR and for basic smoke tests. Have been using c9 before this, but GitPod changed a lot for the better.
Personally, this post made me aware there are existing alternatives to Codespaces. Codespaces is very cool, but it also adds to an ever-growing single point of failure, which is dependence on Github for almost all of our tools and tooling. Using robust alternatives can help to spread that risk around.
On the contrary, the software engineering industry is massive and market validation with more competitors is a good thing. You can build a great business just dealing with companies that don't use Github.
