If you want to make your project more open to contribution you have to use what the rest of the industry is using.
Edit: After reading some responses, I'm really surprised that sqlite does not accept contributions.
They don't want contributions
https://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html
> In order to keep SQLite completely free and unencumbered by copyright, the project does not accept patches.
Don’t spread FUD
https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/860f855ed144703d
> The project requires a document on file but it doesn't accept that document from arbitrary people. It's effectively "by invitation only" and Richard hands out those invitations at his sole discretion.
That's pretty much the opposite of progress.
At one time, 99.9% of developers used CP/M. At time, 99.9% of web was done in PHP. At one time, 99.9% of developers IBM XTs. At one time 99.9% of developers used SourceForce and SVN.
Stuff changes. Monoculture is bad for the tech industry.
It's kind of the same situation with Github. The pain in moving away from it as they continue to slaughter the UX is still pretty great.
So yeah monoculture is bad but progress is painful.
For me, at least, two things eventually made git really manageable: github and the O'Reilly book. After those git was a no brainer. Even with git becoming the de facto standard, if you don't need the integrations it's not so unreasonable to use something else (altho bzr's been discontinued).
If something breaks beacause it cares that I use git and only git, then it's that something that is broken and to be avoided, not the git alternative.
SourceSafe!
This is a key point, and assuming this in the positive is often a mistake. Not all projects want, or can handle, increased contribution.
But my response would be the same as what I argue in these React or other "popular-vs-other-frameworks" discussions that come: the alternatives may be better, faster, easier etc - BUT:
- The popular solution has the larger ecosystem, and there are more existing plugins or modules you can plug-and-play instead of having to build out your own solution for.
- If you hit any edge case or obscure issues with the popular framework, someone somewhere on the Internet has hit it and it's likely a QA on Stackoverflow / Reddit and similar (and hence ChatGPT and other LLMs as a result)
- People understand the popular solution more in depth and it's easier to learn about the architecture as well as its pros and cons.Agreed, I disagree with the other person's point of view, but I find it an interesting point / discussion.
And this is why Microsoft is now in a monopoly position ... again ... simply by buying Github.
Programmers never learn.
mercurial has a plugin to support git, and the reverse exists too. for bazaar as well. interestingly fossil can export to git, and a git repo can be converted, but it can't pull updates from git into fossil. i wonder why.
anyways, the point is, because interoperability exists and is possible there is no technical reason not to use alternative tools despite everyone else using git.