I take some of his points, but this seems kinda...a couple years late here. It seems to me that Git/Mercurial just became the best centralized systems; being d

I take some of his points, but this seems kinda...a couple years late here. It seems to me that Git/Mercurial just became the best centralized systems; being distributed fixed some critical faults with being centralized, and didn't really introduce that much more complexity, IMO. In most use-cases, you're talking about one extra porcelain command in comparison to a server-connected client like SVN or TFS, assuming you push every single changeset. I also think being distributed encourages small chunks of work, where being centralized encourages the batcave approach, and that, I think, is a much bigger differentiator than most people realize. It impacts everything. Suddenly, merging doesn't seem as bad, and then suddenly being able to easily and cheaply create branches is more important. Centralized systems never really got there because the client/server nature works against them. I'm glad to see some big players giving them attention again, because one of the author's best points is that being centralized has certain advantages. It's just that the existing centralized systems suck. I also think the GitHub workflow comparison to the email list + patch days is a bit contrived because the email list procedure was never that simple (well, for getting ignored maybe it was, but the point was to contribute, not be ignored). I, too, remember those days. Steps 1&2 under GitHub aren't really harder than step 1 under CVS (or what have you). He just neglected to mention all the steps involving fiddling with CVS connection parameters, or finding the right URL for a SVN repository (trunk? All the branches? Do I care about tags? Good luck if they aren't using the standard layout). Github #3 also belongs in the first list. Goodness...have you ever read the OpenBSD mailing list? It's about as friendly as EFnet on PMS. I could go on, but the point is that the number of steps for CVS+mailing list isn't really different than with GitHub.