4 ms·

What world do you live in where easy and simple software always wins?

• jpgvm 3y ago
  That is actually my entire point. Easier alternatives to git already exist. However for a confluence of other factors (network effects/inertia, etc) git remains dominant. All this means is git isn't "too hard". It's hard but that hardness isn't great enough to invite a competitor to displace it. Replacing git won't come through offering something easier, likely some other major paradigm shift will be necessary.
  • necovek 3y ago
    That's an interesting take. Having been in the midst of this, it wasn't at all clear Git would have won (against Mercurial and Bazaar, at least in the free software world). There were two main factors contributing to it: Linux Kernel switching to Git, so open source people had to deal with it anyway, and an even bigger factor, GitHub offering a (free) streamlined UI for those most common GitHub operations (basically, making it not-hard). If you compare GitHub to Mercurial hosting web sites of the time, one was decidedly 90s/MySpace like, and another was modern, Facebook-like. IMHO, without GitHub, git does not become the dominant VCS it is today.
    • jpgvm 3y ago
      Yeah that is certainly possible. We could have ended up in a world where GitHub was actually MercurialHub and git probably would have remained the VCS of the kernel and probably many C and C++ projects as a result but much of FOSS (especially the new at the time JS movement) could have ended up on Mercurial instead.