[toyg]

Yup. I remember when git came along the field was already pretty crowded (DVCS, Darcs, Bazaar, BitKeeper, Mercurial...). I've always suspected Linus wrote git in a panic simply to sidestep the months of flames that switching VCS again would have inevitably generated, once BitKeeper stopped being viable. I also remember people jumping at the occasion like they would have never done to improve someone else's tool.

The story of git is a good case-study for people interested in group dynamics.

[WorldMaker]

I agree, the story of git is a good group dynamics case-study. I watched a small bit of it from mailing lists at times.

I was a heavy darcs user at the time and the impression I got was part of the name git in the first place was that it was intentionally the "dumb, dirty, get things done" answer to darcs' (sometimes problematic) smarts. (Remember, the British slang definition of git is "an unpleasant or contemptible person".)

It's also interesting that both Mercurial and git were spun out of the BitKeeper fiasco (BitKeeper was a commercial product that allowed free hosting for Open Source projects, up until the fiasco where they decided they were bored hosting Open Source) by Linux kernel members. Mercurial actually wound up with lead and if I recall correctly was much more usable faster than git was. The problems with Mercurial were that it was written in Python and git was lead by Linus himself and in the apparently more preferable to kernel hackers C, perl, bash, awk, sed, spit, and duct tape development environment.

[madgar]

The problem for Mercurial (with respect to group dynamics) was that it didn't have the built-in user base of Linux contributors right off the bat.

[WorldMaker]

I briefly glossed over it, but Mercurial could have had the Linux contributors right off the back. It was built faster than git and was built with the kernel team in mind. I do think it is an interesting bit of group dynamics that the kernel team as a whole didn't adopt Mercurial (because there were kernel team members on both sides of the Mercurial/git divide), and some of that reason seemed to be, from what I read at the time, simply a dislike of Python by a surprising number of kernel team members.