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It's bigger than him. GitHub built their SaaS on top of it. Had they chosen subversion or fossil, history would be very different.

People use git because everybody else uses git and it started because GitHub provides easy code sharing and a better UI than the alternative — SourceForge and mailing lists.



People could have kept using SVN or whatever else. They jumped ship in droves, way before GitHub.

At the time it was the only distributed and open source VCS. Fossil may have come quickly on its heels, but it was already too late.


Mercurial (hg) was released mere weeks after git saw the light of day, so it's not that.


And others were released before git:

> The first open-source DVCS systems included Arch, Monotone, and Darcs. However, open source DVCSs were never very popular until the release of Git and Mercurial.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_version_control#Hi...




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