So it's a SVN/Perforce style server based VCS with a more modern design. Sounds exactly like Lore from Epic Games but with zero production use outside the company and no support for non text assets. And they won't release the code.
You think you have it bad now when GitHub goes down, wait until you're stuck with an online only client.
This is the weirdest part, because you know, coding is solved, so anyone could create their own one, so why not publish it?
Most big tech have a lot of stuff around SDLC that’s theirs and they couldn’t realistically release it given how specific its deployment, configuration and management is. The marginal benefit to generalizing it is so low that it’s negative.
This is almost certainly worse given the vibed out state of it.
Imagine waking up next week and Claude Code now ships free with builtin source control management via this tech with a better user experience than workspaces. Github and Microsoft would take an instant market share hit in the traffic that they swear is causing all of their outages. And then that cuts off Microsofts access to code to train their own LLMs on in the background, further hampering an Anthropic competitor in the AI race.
They can still do that without releasing the code, can't they?
And by the way things are done at this company, it's almost a given their whole codebase are litter'd with embarassing shit like hardcoded paths, server secrets, weirdo comments picked up from some random chat context and immortalized through Claude speak, etc. There's no way they'd be able to open source anything.
But all of this is besides the point -- the product was never a source control system (who cares about that anymore?), the product is _the narrative_. It does not matter if everything withers and dies as long as the narrative survives, and by that measure I'd say the goal has been achieved.
Making a complex system like this available for general use cases, especially when it's still under active feature development, is hard. It also commits you to providing documentation, upgrade paths, incorporating changes that aren't useful to you and may also cause problems for you, and just generally complicating development and maintenance immensely to the point of drastically slowing development.
My guess is when it's stable or they start building their next version control system, they will start opening it up.
I know especially in this day and age when developing from scratch is so easy, I write most software for myself first and it's way faster to develop than trying to build shared bits. That isn't great for the future of software, however the tragedy of the commons isn't anyone's problem, by definition.
If I were still manually merging conflicts the p4merge tool was GOAT
I used it in git