Is there any hope for other DVCS in the Git imperium?

August 25, 2011 | 1 Minute Read
This post was originally posted on my old blog.

As we are entering the era of language wars on the JVM there is another war looming on the horizon...

This new war is coming out of the realm of distributed version control systems:

Git seems to have a nearly undisputed imperium in this realm and recently has squished its known competitors:

• GitHub is THE repository for thriving open source projects. Recently I find me browsing on GitHub much more often than on Google Code or CodePlex ... while BitBucket as the main Mercurial contener only plays a marginal role in my experience.
• Google Code, who was favoring SVN and Mercurial for some time, recently added Git support ...
• A lot of the new hot-and-hyped cloud based PaaS are using Git as their tool of choice for deployment: Heroku, JBoss OpenShift, AppHarbor ...

Despite the seemingly striking dominance of Git, there are still brave contenders sprouting out of the dvcs land:

• Veracity by sourcegear
• Plastic SCM
• and older, yet still thriving: Mercurial, Bazaar, Fossil ...

All of them featuring some unique features (although features I am not always sure I would like to see coupled to a source control system ...) and most of them somehow promising more simplicity compared to Git.

I wonder if they have any chance against the massive momentum of Git and its ecosystem ...