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Comment by onebot | Hacker News Reader

"GitHub hit one of the great gushers of the last decade (and let's face it, they mainly hit it for reasons that had little do with, um, their actions)"

Really? If they didn't do anything why would you even be paying them your $100 to begin with. They essentially built a social network around version control with an amazing user experience. Do you remember Sourceforge? Which would you rather use?

It isn't fair to discount the value of GitHub or the effort they put into building a great product just because it costs more than you want to pay.

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The author appears to have awoken from this binary worldview. He didn't realize that there were other services out there beyond github and sourceforge. Kind of like people who don't know that there are browsers other than Internet Explorer or Chrome.

In the case of source hosting, bitbucket turns out to be pretty great! So it's natural that someone who's just discovered it will be pretty enthusiastic about jumping over to it.

What's baffled me over the years is how bad bitbucket is about marketing themselves. It's been improved somewhat by the Atlassian purchase, but still, they are totally underperforming their potential.

Part of the issue is that they historically were a mercurial hosting shop, so it's not like they were a direct replacement for Github. It was only in the last year or so that they added git support.

It's almost precisely a year since they introduced Git support. That's cool.

Part of the history to remember is that Mercurial and Git started at about the same time and on almost equal footing. GitHub was frequently cited at the time as a reason to use git. As in, "yeah git has kind of a crappy interface, but look at how big that community is!" The GitHub team really grabbed the momentum and never let it go. Now git is so common that supporting it is basically mandatory.

But it didn't have to end up that way. In a counterfactual history where the positions were reversed and HgHub and Gitbucket were founded, I think that HgHub would have dominated through a better focus on acquiring a community.

Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people that were git fanatics prior to github. Git was also the vcs of choice for Ruby / Rails developers.

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