There are, broadly speaking, two ways for a tool to become popular. The first is to be really good, and unfortunately that way doesn't work. The second is to

There are, broadly speaking, two ways for a tool to become popular. The first is to be really good, and unfortunately that way doesn't work. The second is to already be popular, and that's where MySQL and Git came from. If git weren't written by Linus Torvalds, I'm sure it wouldn't have become nearly as popular. Git is, per the XKCD, a really neat graph system. There's not much that's special about that, though. Now it exists, we can write another just like it as a programming tutorial. The UI is better than it used to be, that's pretty much the best that can be said about it. But if you know the magic incantations you need to interact with it, and especially if you're using IDEs, it's really no worse than CVS. The biggest difference between git and MySQL is that the former is solid underpinnings but poor UI and the latter is poor underpinnings but easy to deploy. In both cases, the foibles are well enough known that most folk don't need to worry about them, and and most projects I've worked on would derive no benefit from switching to a different system that's only going to confuse people. I say this as someone who appreciates the graph, but has occasionally resorted to invoking plumbing directly because I can't work out which plumbing commands would do what I wanted.