[bsder]

We had Monotone, Darcs and others. We still have Mercurial.

They all coexisted and were being developed. Even Github wasn't a big deal in the beginning and was just one of many providers who were all bootstrapped.

However, once GitHub hit the field with $100 million in VC cash it squashed further development cold--bootstrapping and quality doesn't matter much against someone burning VC cash against you.

Distributed source control is now in a path dependent local minimum and we are stuck with git because we are stuck with GitHub--better is no longer sufficient to break the logjam.

Until Microsoft turns the screws enough this will all remain status quo.