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git won in the greater world because of github.com. There was nothing at the time for mercurial OSS hosting.

Sure there was, it was called stash (and then that was bought by atlassian becoming bitbucket). You could host mercurial repos there until just a few years ago.

And at that point, even the use of dvcs was in question, so you could use svn on google's forge, or sourceforge. Launchpad had bzr support too.

It wasn't clear github was going to win until it was clear that git was going to win.

Google Code also had hg support before it had git support, if I remember right. Certainly the SVN -> hg migration was easier than SVN -> git if you were using it.

And canonical's launchpad.net

At the time I’m talking about that was a proprietary forge for bzr, Canonical’s unnecessary version of baz, which was the community fork of tla, which was the GNU experiment in DVCS with an even worse interface than git.

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