> an entire class of argument [...] mostly vanish if the underlying data model in the de facto standard was rich enough to support the actual work of software development.
Interesting idea. You think we could develop a unified data model that covers source code, static files, documentation, project management and community management as a single unified thing?
That’s certainly ambitious, and I’d love to see it. For the moment it seem that Git has won for source code (in a pretty crowded field) because just that part was hard and it was a big improvement. The collaboration tools it includes, mostly around email, appear to be inadequate for most projects. So now we see a healthy ecosystem that adds rich collaboration on top of / next to Git.
> no widely used DVCS is actually distributed in practice
I think this is due to economic and social factors rather than technical ones. Fully distributing a Git repo is very doable, but harder to think about than the Github model. Plus you have all the normal P2P problems around who’s online and how good their connection is.
> tooling around version control is subject to platform monopolization
Again, I think this is simply the social network effect more than anything else. Making a website for your project let’s people find it, use it, and contribute to it. The bar to entry is lowered further if it’s a common platform, where people already have accounts and know how it works, and where they can get a consolidated view of all their activity.
Centralized hosting makes even more sense as projects grow and you only want a subset of the code on any given development machine. Eventually big monorepos preset serious scaling challenges.
Still... I completely agree that it would be awesome to have a more self-sovereign computing architecture writ large. I’m just pessimistic we can get there from here.