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Comment by snitty | Hacker News Reader

Lots of firms (usually bigger ones) use version control internally. But it can be a mess to try to get two or more firms, their clients, etc., all to use version control, let alone the same system.

Pretty much everyone uses track changes in Word, though. And if not they should.

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If you want version control you need a format, that is amendable to version control. So, some uncompressed text markup.

Interesting observation over the last few weeks of playing with OpenDocument is that the revision control feature works by creating new local style for every change, which creates total havoc when you try to diff the .fodt or content.xml by external tools.

Just as it's hard to get two software firms to use the same version control syst- oh wait literally everyone runs on git.

This is actually a problem in the games industry, where git is generally impractical for assets and things like Perforce or even SVN are used instead. It’s often preferable to put the code in the same place too, which interacts poorly with disciplines that have good reason to use git instead.

Well, software firms have already been using some variant of VCS for a while. The legal world needs to first get sold on the concept (at least on all the bits beyond Word's "Track Changes" functionality), and then... well, nobody but techies looks at VCS based on richness of CLI commands, or depth of mathematical foundation, or provenance / industry cred of its authors -- lawyers will want something with reasonable GUI UX; whether it's powered by Git or Mercurial or whatever, doesn't really matter.

(FWIW, I think embedding Git support in MS Office would do a lot towards VCS adoption outside of tech.)

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