Because it was a lot better than the alternatives and free? I introduced Subversion at my first job, we were sharing updates over FTP and heavily coordinating

Because it was a lot better than the alternatives and free? I introduced Subversion at my first job, we were sharing updates over FTP and heavily coordinating who worked on what before. Subversion was definitely a step up, but branching/merging was very problematic and time consuming. I still find Git confusing as hell sometimes, and would guess most developers use like 50% of the features tops; without GitHub or something similar it wouldn't have gone anywhere.