"[..]but just as distributed vcs' had won over svn a few years ago,"<p>This is an odd statement, which deserves more explanation. DVCSs have won in the arena of early-adopter programmers who actually care about these things enough to read them, but I'd guess that the number of SVN users still trumps the number of git/hg users by several orders of magnitude. Moreover, I'd guess that the number of programmer who have <i>heard</i> about git/hg is incredibly small as well (compared to SVN or other systems.)<p>By the way, hg has definitely won <i>me</i>. I use it with an online project management and hosting service called Codebasehq.com, which I recommend any time this comes up - I really love their interface, and their pricing options (you pay per project, which can have several repositories tied to it; you can even have several hg repos and several SVN repos tied to the same project, which is what I do.)
I've actually found bitbucket slowly becoming a good competitor to github.<p>From a sales point of view, bitbucket's offering of 5 free private repos might actually help them attract more developers who are making proprietary apps and making money, and then more willing to pay for more repos in the future. I personally have quite a few repos there partly because I don't want the publicity of github (and partly because hg was quicker to learn than git :P). I also know a friend who switched to bitbucket simply due to the private repo offerings.<p>For open source though, github is probably the way to go.<p>This is all just anecdotal though, I'd love to hear some solid evidence if anyone has some.
Github has "won" in that it's the current darling child of the code-hosting industry. It's done this for two reasons:<p>1. Git is superior to its competitors as a technology for use by developers. It isn't very much superior these days, but it is enough to be noticeable and preferred. This is a superiority in <i>use</i> and <i>performance</i>, which are enough of an edge to offset its architectural failings.<p>2. Github has better UX than the competition: I've been referring to code hosted in bitbucket frequently, and I often sigh at what they're doing. Getting to any given piece of code takes longer and requires more clicks than on Github. Github also has great features for understanding how code is moving within a project, and I find them more comprehensible and useful than the competition's.<p>It doesn't hurt that Github is a small self-started company with a staff full of brilliant people and a talented support staff. They certainly win the <i>personality</i> part of the competition thoroughly.
I'm not sure I'd say it has "won" - such a phrase implies a long-term positioning at the front of the pack, and those that came before it for code hosting (SourceForge, Google Code) enjoyed their time in the spotlight before having something new come along.<p>BitBucket in particular have made a good attempt after the Atlassian takeover, with the infinite free private repos being the most interesting part - I use it a lot, but mostly because I do a lot of small personal projects, and so the "social" features of GitHub - those which benefit most from its prominence - are mostly meaningless to me.
I don't believe there will ever be a clear "winner" because the landscape is constantly changing. Sourceforge was THE place to store your OSS code and provide downloads and there was a really great broad selection of code and a way to discover it. But they didn't build good ways of managing it and the whole experience became cluttered and confusing. I saw many projects move to Google Code who provided a clean interface.<p>And now I see many of those projects move to github and everyone I know is a big fan of the forking and pull requests.<p>But the landscape will change again and github keeps needing to iterate and innovate on their product. Just about every time I use github, I curse their disastrous search. There is just so much innovation they could develop around code management which they don't have, a competitor could jump in and they too could become the darling of the development world. They too will have "won".
It occurs to me just now that it's kinda weird that subversion repositories are pretty much distributed everywhere; git repositories generally end up on github.
I started using bitbucket a month ago and everything went fine. I'm new to version control and selected mercurial as my VCS, so I was happy by finding a github counterpart.<p>I think it's wrong to compare bitbucket to github. You won't move to github because github is superior, but if you want to move to git, you'll probably do.<p>Bitbucket has all I need. I don't think I need any other fancy features, I already get things done the right way. I'm using the free version, but would upgrade if needed.<p>Also, make sure you read the down times before you argue about it:<p>"Bitbucket will be unavailable for approximately two hours starting Monday, Nov 1st, 01:00 GMT for a kernel upgrade."
I normally shy away from writing provocative information-light rants. The important parts (for me):<p>1. github is a social service, or perhaps best used as a social service<p>2. it has "the momentum", which is paramount for social services<p>3. git has "the momentum" wrt adoption of dvcs<p>There are assumptions implicit within these arguments that I've accepted, based largely on the summation of 'soft' and anecdotal evidence that has built up over the last couple years. People are right to challenge them, and right in their criticism that I take them at face value.
Disclaimer: I've only used Github for projects where either I'm the only coder, or where someone else was the only coder and I was just handling some release management stuff. So I've not experienced the full glory of collaboration via Github.<p>Am I the only one who is not particular impressed with Github? It seems OK, but not in a different league from other code hosting places the way many make it out to be.
As others here and in the blog comments have pointed out, this post is semantically incoherent. But it was worth reading for the reference to hg-git alone. Cool stuff!
I've said it multiple times but github won because of what they focused on - code:<p><a href="http://goo.gl/XfvG" rel="nofollow">http://goo.gl/XfvG</a> (<a href="http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers-why-people-keep.html" rel="nofollow">http://lusislog.blogspot.com/2010/10/designed-for-developers...</a> for the paranoid)
Come on. Saying "yay Github" does not mean that Git/Github have 'won'. What does it even mean to say that, anyway?<p>"Yay Mercurial!" there we are, hg wins!! Whoo!!<p>Who the hell thought this counted as news? Even as opinion, it's wishy washy.