Well, we should be a little fair to cvs and svn. The C in cvs stands for "concurrent" as in the absence of locks. That how they differed from competing products

Well, we should be a little fair to cvs and svn. The C in cvs stands for "concurrent" as in the absence of locks. That how they differed from competing products. Lockfiles existed, but were intended to be mostly informative as they could easily be forced by anyone with write access, and were intended for special situations. The merge logic were pretty much identical for git and svn. The reason git is so much more advanced now is that is has improved a lot while svn doesn't see that much development anymore. I agree that git and hg felt like the future, and bazaar and arcs before them, but mostly because they represented another workflow very different from other products, not because of some specific technical reason. Version control is a network effect and you don't see the gains until everyone agrees on a common workflow. The rest is an implementation detail. OpenBSD is famous for being a strong culture around their cvs for example and it works for them.