[jsmeaton]

You don’t think if the company behind GitHub went all-in on mercurial that might have emerged as the winner? There were plenty of companies using either. Git wasn’t the only distributed game in town. I definitely think GitHub had a lot to do with it.

[oooyay]

Before there was GitHub there was Sourceforge. Sourceforge supported several different protocols and git still won.

Gits internals can be confusing at first, but once you understand them there's really nothing you can't do. Being distributed by design also helps.

[jmmv]

Sourceforge had a flat namespace for projects and required you to manually apply for each project. It was a PITA and that added a huge barrier to entry.

Plus it didn’t have a mechanism to send contributions. I think GitHub “won” because of its web-based PR system.

[cruffle_duffle]

Sourceforge was complete garbage though. I hated, hated when projects were hosted on it. It was slow, full of ads, impossible to find what you need to download..

GitHub is to sourceforge what Facebook was to MySpace. MySpace was first but it was buggy as hell.

[CRConrad]

You're kind of disproving the point you're trying to make, IMO: Saying "GitHub made git the standard!" is kind of like saying "Facebook invented social media!"

Nope, MySpace did. Or blogs, for that matter. Facebook just co-opted the phenomenon, and has for many become synonymous with it. Just like GitHub has managed to do with git.

[darkwater]

SF started to be filled with ads only in a second phase. By memory I would say around 2010, and checking Wikipedia it says it changes ownership in 2012. But when it was the de facto "central repository" for Linux softwares codebases, I don't remember it being full of ads.

[silisili]

That comparison is pretty harsh and really underemphasizes how awful sourceforge was. Myspace was mostly fine, death by feature creep. Sourceforge was a flaming pile of garbage that was poorly designed, ad laden, AND silently bundled in ad/spyware to normal downloads.

A more apt comparison would be comparing Facebook to a hypothetical social media site that when you click on a thumbnail of a user's image, you get a fullsize image of something like goatse...which thankfully doesn't exist(yet).

[medstrom]

You mean the comparison is too mild? https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/harsh

[phatskat]

I read it as harsh to MySpace, because that was very unfair to MySpace imo

[silisili]

Oh, meant harsh to Myspace, which wasn't that bad really.

[bsder]

Sourceforge wasn't the only offering at the time.

Lots of companies were doing Git and Mercurial "forges" at the time. Many of them were better than Github.

Everything was evolving nicely (including Git and Github) until Github used VC money to offer everything for free to blow everybody out in order to lock people into their product (for example--export of anything other than code is still hit or miss on Github).

At which point, everything in the source control space completely collapsed.

[mardifoufs]

That's such a weird rewriting of history. I know blaming VC is very fun and all, but Bitbucket, originally centered around mercurial, had just as much resources as GitHub and even more. Tons of early contributors to git and the ecosystem were from google and Microsoft. Microsoft started using and shifting towards gif when GitHub was still a baby, etc.

[bsder]

> That's such a weird rewriting of history. I know blaming VC is very fun and all, but Bitbucket, originally centered around mercurial, had just as much resources as GitHub and even more.

You might want to go review your history before accusing someone else of that.

Github took $100 million from VCs in 2012. It then took another $250 million from VCs in 2015. Who the hell else was even within an order of magnitude of that in the same timeframe? Nobody. (Gitlab took almost the same amounts but did so somewhere between 5-8 years later depending upon how you count).

Bitbucket got bought by Atlassian in 2012. Atlassian was bootstrapped until it took $60 million in VC in 2010 and had revenues (not profits) of about $100 million in that time frame. It had nowhere near the resources to be able to drop the equivalent of $350 million on Bitbucket between 2012-2015.

[zimpenfish]

Minor nit.

> Bitbucket got bought by Atlassian in 2012.

29th September 2010[0] (just over a month after Atlassian raised the $60M.) ~18 months before Github took any VC money. If the VC money was key to Github's success, why did Atlassian/Bitbucket's 18 month head start not get them anywhere?

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160303204710/http://www.itwire...

[duggan]

By 2012 the writing was already on the wall. This was already well into the first PaaS era with Heroku, Engine Yard, etc. Github was bootstrapped, and using git was a grassroots movement. It was just better than what most people had been using. I never looked back after first switching from SVN to git in 2009.

VCs didn't make git successful, developers did.

[mardifoufs]

Sure, but 2010 to 2012 might as well be two different eras in the context of VCS adoption. Things changed very quickly.

In any case,that doesn't really matter considering that git had big players adopting before GitHub got any sizeable investment. And I'm not just talking about Linux. Rails migrated towards it when GitHub was still in beta.

[immibis]

Sourceforge isn't GitHub. What's the relevance?

If you think SF+CVS is equivalent to GitHub+Git then you never used SF+CVS. Git won because of GitHub, specifically, not because generically it could be hosted on the Internet.

[CRConrad]

No, GitHub won because of git, lots of VC (later MS) money, and brilliant marketing that makes people think "Git won because of GitHub".

[Suppafly]

To be fair, by the time git came around, sourceforge had been enshitifying itself for 10 years or so. Git would be popular without github, github just makes things easier.

[CRConrad]

> Git would be popular without github,

Yep.

> github just makes things easier.

Which is the transition between steps 1 and 2 of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Though the last step is nowadays perhaps unnecessary, depending on how you look at it: Having co-opted FOSS software like git, what you need to extinguish is not that itself, just any other way to use it than your own. The main example of step 2 was of course "Pull Requests".

[fragmede]

yeah, git is just the right layer of indirection to support everyone's weird take on how the workflow should go, so you can just use it however you want.

[CRConrad]

> I definitely think GitHub had a lot to do with it.

And I definitely think you're wrong. GitHub has managed to get itself conflated with git, and has benefitting hugely from this confusion.