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by pdw 1955 days ago
No, even at the time of GitHub's founding Git was already the clear winner. Think about it, why did GitHub feel safe launching with only Git support, while its competitors (Google Code, Bitbucket, SourceForge) had support for multiple VCSs?
3 comments
simonw 1955 days ago
Disagree. Git wasn't the clear winner when GitHub launched - and in fact the entire category of distributed version control was still proving itself.

I remember the GitHub team investing huge amounts of effort into convincing people to use git and teaching them how to do it - one of the four co-founders (Scott) was dedicated to that effort full-time.

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Person5478 1955 days ago
git was the clear winner when github released.
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mikey_p 1955 days ago
Not really, lots of folks were using mercurial with BitBucket which didn't support Git at the time. Bazaar and Launchpad were also pretty common. I remember at one point around 2009-2010 I was semi-regularly using CVS, Subversion, Mercurial, Bazaar and Git.
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Person5478 1955 days ago
lots of people were using lots of things at that time, most were using git.
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dialamac 1953 days ago
You have no evidence to back this claim up, because it’s not true.
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Macha 1955 days ago
Its competitors didn't have support for multiple VCSes. Sourceforge was CVS only, Google Code did SVN (and maybe CVS?), Bitbucket was hg only _and_ later. Many of these were later forced to add git support (and google code added hg iirc), but tying your source code host to a single version system was the norm when github launched.
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dialamac 1953 days ago
Um.. no it wasn’t. Git was a complete trash fire on Windows when GitHub was founded for one.

I started using git when I was working on embedded Linux professionally in 2005, witnessing the whole bitkeeper saga. I am keenly aware of the history of DVCS 15 years ago.

Meanwhile outside the bubble of academia and startup web devs in 2008, Windows was still by far the most widely used dev platform. I typically deployed Mercurial when I wanted to convince a wider technical audience others of the beauty of DVCS.

GitHub felt safe the same way Instagram (among many) felt safe deploying for iOS only, even when then Android had a larger user base. There are other factors at play, and it was not that git had some kind of major advantage in 2008. If anything mercurial had a slight edge. But if anything in 2008, the wider DVCS market was still in its infancy.

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