"Thanks" was my first thought too.

Thanks Gitorious for sponsoring the code hosting of so many free software projects for many years. I know it must have taken a lot of work to set up and maintain all that infrastructure. Thanks also for developing a great piece of free software; AGPL to boot. I hope you have made some money from the sale of your company and are able to continue to contribute to free software.

Looking at the bigger picture, we have an enormous number of developers using GitHub without being aware of the issues around centralised network services and non-free Javascript. There's a great opportunity for disruption here, and Gitlab is at least on the right track. Without a free-of-charge hosted version with private repositories, the bar is too high for GitHub users to consider switching.

Beyond that, we also need decentralisation so that you don't have to sign up to someone's code hosting site just to post a patch (email doesn't count). Oh, and trivial deployment of your own code hosting (without some big hairball like the current Gitlab download).