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IMHO it was Github which made git popular. GH filled a gap left when Sourceforge went down the shitter, and Github was there at the right time to host open sour

IMHO it was Github which made git popular. GH filled a gap left when Sourceforge went down the shitter, and Github was there at the right time to host open source projects for free. The actual version control system used (svn vs git) wasn't all that important. The important feature was free hosting.

antod 3y ago
Yeah, hardly anyone cared what Linux used (a few years earlier before Bitkeeper it was mostly just patches). But Rails was a very early Github user, and the big Rails usage upswing coincided with that and helped drive it. I was a Python and PHP dev at the time, and that other stuff mostly predated Github and was scattered across all kinds of places. Whereas Rails and Github both kicked off about the same time, and practically no Rails devs or libraries used anything else. It was that fast growth and hype combined with the network effects of Github that drove git usage rather than what Linux used. The Linux contribution workflow was also pretty alien to Github focused webdevs.
xorcist 3y ago
This. Free hosting has mass market appeal. It is a so much bigger market the product itself isn't terribly important. Not until the later pivot to a paid product. That's how Sourceforge rose to become so dominant it appeared unstoppable, and how Docker became immensely popular so quickly.
jasode 3y ago
>IMHO it was Github which made git popular. [...] The important feature was free hosting. Bitbucket also had free Mercurial hosting in 2009. I think it was 1 private repo in the free plan and it was later expanded to unlimited free repos with max 5 users around 2011.
agumonkey 3y ago
was there ever a github for mercurial ?
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
For sure; Github was also (IMO) responsible for the rise and success of NodeJS and its dependency ecosystem, and consequently the web based front-end ecosystem we have today (angular, react, vite, etc).

antod 3y ago

Yeah, hardly anyone cared what Linux used (a few years earlier before Bitkeeper it was mostly just patches). But Rails was a very early Github user, and the big Rails usage upswing coincided with that and helped drive it. I was a Python and PHP dev at the time, and that other stuff mostly predated Github and was scattered across all kinds of places. Whereas Rails and Github both kicked off about the same time, and practically no Rails devs or libraries used anything else. It was that fast growth and hype combined with the network effects of Github that drove git usage rather than what Linux used. The Linux contribution workflow was also pretty alien to Github focused webdevs.

xorcist 3y ago

This. Free hosting has mass market appeal. It is a so much bigger market the product itself isn't terribly important. Not until the later pivot to a paid product. That's how Sourceforge rose to become so dominant it appeared unstoppable, and how Docker became immensely popular so quickly.

jasode 3y ago

>IMHO it was Github which made git popular. [...] The important feature was free hosting. Bitbucket also had free Mercurial hosting in 2009. I think it was 1 private repo in the free plan and it was later expanded to unlimited free repos with max 5 users around 2011.

agumonkey 3y ago

was there ever a github for mercurial ?

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

For sure; Github was also (IMO) responsible for the rise and success of NodeJS and its dependency ecosystem, and consequently the web based front-end ecosystem we have today (angular, react, vite, etc).