And yet people overwhelmingly chose Git. Why is that?
That Github used this strange version control system cobbled together by the Linux kernel devs for their specific workflow was a bit weird, but that wasn't a showstopper for moving to Github.
After all it was just one amongst many version control systems, and a VCS shouldn't be the centre of the universe anyway, over time Github would probably offer different systems anyway after they become more popular.
Nobody expected that Github was essentially a Trojan horse ;)
GitHubs model is incredibly more viral and thus git won (sadly IMO).
* Bitbucket provided unlimited free private repositories and they were exclusively Mercurial. Github had limits for private repos.
* Google evaluated both and preferred Mercurial for code.google.com http://www.saturngod.net/articles/dvcsanalysis-support-analy....
* Fogcreek (creators of Trello and Stackoverflow) picked Mercurial to power Kiln
Early on, both tools had different advantages but they evolved toward each other making the choice more about flavor and popularity. My guess is
* git was strongly associated with Linus so it won that crowd handily
* Github had a stronger association with open source than Bitbucket (dunno why though). Maybe it all came down to marketing. <-- there's a startup lesson
Maybe because it was bought by Atlassian.
Nope! Bitbucket had the "free private, paid public" model from the start. IIRC, Atlassian actually changed the model to allow unlimited public repositories after they purchased Bitbucket. It's possible that if BB had started with this model, they'd have been a much stronger competitor.
Early on GitHub gave out free public repositories, but Bitbucket gave our free private repositories. Working in public is aligned much more closely with open source than working in private is.
Hg was slow, and the (custom) python plugins around it we used were frustrating (specifically, we had a build pipeline that used the mercurial module in python, along with an arcane scons thing) and there were some specifically irritating pain points like bookmarks and shelve that didn't seem to work properly.
I mean, I get it, network effect... but all I can say is at least some people (like me) tried both and pick git on technical merit.
i was using mercurial and svn before git. git was hard to learn but i went with efficiency and speed over convenience. also, if you have a good shell or a good GUI you don't need to memorize git commands. and if you are not a game developer uploading large binaries, git is the best around.
It's still probably slower for huge repos (I havn't checked), but I doubt it will bother you much nowadays.
I used Hg before Git professionally, because when they were both new, Hg had _much_ better Windows support.