5000 requests per hour, so they could have all their issues imported in less than an hour.

Why call this anything but just straight up FUD related to MS hate? I've been amused by the negative reaction to the acquisition, as if GitHub was somehow a charity before MS bought them, and overnight became the reincarnated as Darth Vader.

Let's take a look at what's missing:

> But independent of that, GitHub has always had a vendor lock-in with the user's issues and pull requests hidden behind a rate limited API instead of a proper export feature. And even if you managed to export it through that API, you can not host your own GitHub instance and modify it as you like because there is not even a partially open source version of it.

With gitlab, we have one API call to request the entire export, and another one to download it. Whereas with GitHub we need a script that queries the API for all kinds of information we would like to extract. Whenever GitHub changes their API, it needs to be adjusted. And there aren't many projects out there that do this. Besides running a full gitlab instance, the best way seems to be the "github-backup" project [1], and it can not keep up with GitHub's changes:

> Notes added to commits and lines of code don't get backed up yet. There is only recently API support for this.

But the part that really matters is that you can not run your own GitHub instance after you exported all the data with the API and your preferred script.

With the tools available today, the next best thing for us to switching from GitHub to gitlab and using gitlab's export functionality would be running a local gitlab instance that does the GitHub import once a week, and using that as fallback. But if you are willing to do that, then you might as well switch to gitlab completely, just like we did it.

[1]: https://github-backup.branchable.com/README/

    {
      "resources": {
        "core": {
          "limit": 60,
          "remaining": 58,
          "reset": 1530102452
        },
        "search": {
          "limit": 10,
          "remaining": 10,
          "reset": 1530099950
        },
        "graphql": {
          "limit": 0,
          "remaining": 0,
          "reset": 1530103490
        }
      },
      "rate": {
        "limit": 60,
        "remaining": 58,
        "reset": 1530102452
      }
    }

> For API requests using Basic Authentication or OAuth, you can make up to 5000 requests per hour.

> For unauthenticated requests, the rate limit allows for up to 60 requests per hour.

https://developer.github.com/v3/#rate-limiting