That's true, but it's something of a self-inflicted wound. The release of git and hg was a direct response to McVoy yanking BitKeeper away (withdrawing the fre

That's true, but it's something of a self-inflicted wound. The release of git and hg was a direct response to McVoy yanking BitKeeper away (withdrawing the free-beer licensing terms that had previously allowed gratis use for free/open source projects); both were initially announced on the Linux-kernel mailing list as responses to McVoy's move, and each had had only a few weeks' worth of work at that point. Before that, there had been a good deal of grumbling about the ever-shifting terms of the "don't piss off Larry license", whose increasingly draconian terms were designed to prevent the development of competitive software. (The last available version purported to bind all users to a non-compete preventing them from contributing to another SCM; I'm not sure California law would have allowed McVoy to enforce a non-compete on his own employees!) However, so long as these difficulties remained theoretical, there was not, in fact, much serious work going on to develop such competition. But when Larry revoked the license, effectively forcing the kernel developers to come up with an alternative damn quick, they did --- and damn quick. So, the clones aren't something that the customers did when they got dissatisfied with BitMover; they're something that happened after BitMover chose, on their own, to end the relationship. Which makes them, as I said, a self-inflicted wound, that BitMover could have avoided through better customer relations management.