Git is the most pervasive implementation of distributed snapshot version control. That model existed for a long time; Git was just the first version that was fr

Git is the most pervasive implementation of distributed snapshot version control. That model existed for a long time; Git was just the first version that was free (Monotone and tla beat it), fast (Monotone used to be comparable), and had a major reason to adopt it (GitHub finally allowed developers to sanely have a code portfolio) that it became popular. Pijul stands to do the same thing for the patch-based model. Darcs has existed for a long time at this point, but it's not popular, because it's slow. Darcs had the free part from the beginning, but was slow; Pijul is aiming to finally be free and fast enough to allow adoption. If those things both happen, I'd expect a GitHub workalike to show up as well. Being the first with an idea doesn't count for much if you can't execute on it in a way that others like. Darcs clearly has failed at that; Pijul is aiming to do better. We'll have to wait and see if it does.