Popularity means developers, which means bugfixes and more features in the future which projects may want to use. Switching DVCS has a cost to a project. Thus s

Popularity means developers, which means bugfixes and more features in the future which projects may want to use. Switching DVCS has a cost to a project. Thus software popularity is important. This may be unfortunate, but this is how it is. DVCSs are by no means complete today, and cross-pollination of features continues. An unpopular project that has fewer developers working on it will fall behind. A project that doesn't want to keep switching DVCS has a reasonable interest in the DVCS project's future, since future features will come "for free".