As for NIH, kinda a bit but not really. Fossil was first released in 2006, Git in 2005 (mercurial in 2005 as well). At this point in time, there was no clear "D

As for NIH, kinda a bit but not really. Fossil was first released in 2006, Git in 2005 (mercurial in 2005 as well). At this point in time, there was no clear "DVCS" (distributed version control system) winner yet. The author of Fossil is drh, who is a lot more famous for being the author of sqlite (who also happens to be a major player in the TCL community). If I remember correctly[0], Fossil was written a) to dogfood sqlite (fossil uses sqlite) and also b) to get something able to not just do the VC part for sqlite, but tightly integrated issue tracking, docs, rel-eng, etc in one single system, as well as some VC-related features not present in git/mercurial and other competitors of the time (and in many cases not available in git or mercurial of today). [0] I looked into all this new-fangled DVCS stuff back then, because it looked really interesting compared to subversion that I was using at the time, and was a pain.