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 soft

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.