> github has a billion-dollar valuation based on the fact that Linus Torvalds wrote and open-sourced git, and pretty much for no other reason. No, github has a

> github has a billion-dollar valuation based on the fact that Linus Torvalds wrote and open-sourced git, and pretty much for no other reason. No, github has a billion-dollar valuation based on the fact that they took a pretty empty market (source code hosting) and created a developer ecosystem around it. Whether they used git, or mercurial, or svn, or any other version control system really doesn't make a big difference. They happened to pick up on the fact that git was picking up steam and went all-in on that bet, but you can replace git with practically any other VCS and it still could have worked. In fact, I'd say it brought more younger developers and enterprise companies to git than git bringing the developers to them.