Yep, it was Github rather than git. Rails being hosted on Github early on was a big factor too. The rest of the Ruby community followed. Then came about 3/4s of

Yep, it was Github rather than git. Rails being hosted on Github early on was a big factor too. The rest of the Ruby community followed. Then came about 3/4s of the Python community (some big holdouts still on hg though), then the fast growing Javascript community etc. The network effect of Github collaboration snowballed it in a way a standalone source control tool couldn't. In those early Github days the Rails community had the most effective evangelism and hipster clout. The "modern git" vs "crufty svn" narrative back then closely paralleled the "modern Ruby/Rails" vs "crufty Java" narrative too. The Linux kernel community was never going to drive widespread git adoption by itself - the average coder would never do any kernel coding. At the time, the core Linux devs only cared about making a tool for themselves, and they still don't like the way Github works.