[2] Although it was freely available to be downloaded and installed, it was written primarily as the basis for the Gitorious shared web hosting service at gitorious.org, until it was acquired by GitLab in 2015.

GitLab kept gitorious.org online through May 2015 and added an automatic migration function for project to move to GitLab.com which offers both paid and free hosting services and maintains an open source "community" edition for self-hosting.

GitLab CEO Sytse Sijbrandij, responding to comments about the acquisition on Hacker News, wrote that "[Powow] wanted to shut the company down without a bankruptcy".

In addition to providing optional migration to GitLab.com, GitLab opened discussions with Archive.org about preserving the Gitorious repositories for historical reference.

[10] As of mid-2016, as a result of efforts by GitLab, ex-Gitorious staff, and Archive Team, Gitorious.org existed as a read-only mirror of its former self, containing some 120,000 repositories comprising 5TB of data.