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Comment by SeriousM | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab has private repos for free and the service is imho on par with github

I agree, and quite like Gitlab, but Github's recent decision to allow free private repos has surely put a bit of a dent in Gitlab/Bitbucket's marketshare expansion - many people were using those services instead of Github just for that feature.

As does BitBucket which I prefer just because it matches what I use at work. I also keep a GitLab for backup type reasons.

Also Bitbucket supports mercurial repositories, which is a shame has so little support on the other big platforms.

Git won though. I'm not especially a fan of git, but at this point advocating for mercurial is tilting at windmills.

Git won in the same sense that chrome won or windows won, there's value in having alternatives and I would like to have the option of mercurial in more settings.

I am not advocating for use of git or mercurial, use whatever suits your needs! But I think having a platform like bitbucket support alternatives to git is a big plus for developer freedom to chose.

I think another interesting VCS is probably Fossil. It's very self-capable and self-contained. I wish it were a little more commonly used, but git or mercurial is where it's at I suppose. I keep meaning to use mercurial more, maybe I should for my BitBucket projects, it's not like it makes much difference since JetBrains IDE's handle the under the hood version control commands.

GitHub is way behind those two is is coasting on their strength in open source hosting.

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