One thing I love about DVC is that it doesn't need its own server. I can just push/pull files via SSH. I don't really want one more service that I need to keep running. I also happen to have a lot of space available to me on a server I can't install extra services on, so oxen requiring that is a deal breaker for me.

Cool! To be honest I don’t really use dvc much, but the project version control features are what really interest me. I like how data pipelines help align versioned artifacts like model checkpoints and visualizations with the datasets and code that produced. I work as a computational science and that sort of reproducibility tool is really important, and a lot of us don’t have the best software engineering skills/discipline.

From your readme it seems like the oxen repo and software project repo are not as closely coupled as in dvc? It seemed like in the current state of oxen, you could do something similar with make files and oxen tracking?

Oxen seems really good for longer lived data and computational science projects, where dvc seems more oriented just at analysis projects. I have a project that I want to try it out on :)