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GitHub won because it was good.

SourceForge had a messy interface and frankly I hated it. Google Code was like frozen in time, like most Google projects. Microsoft’s thing — I don’t even remember the name — felt half assed and like they were going to abandon it… and they abandoned it. There were also others… none of which I even think were serious enough.

Also Git won because SVN and CVS were centralized VCSes and you needed a server. I can just make Git repos before I even know if a project is serious.

There were other distributed VCSes of course, like Hg, but they either cost $ or wasn’t backed by a major user… like Linux. I admittedly just waited this one out and chose Git because it was more popular.



You either meant Visual SourceSafe or Team Foundation Server for the Microsoft product.

SourceSafe did get abandoned... because your source wasn't actually safe in it.

Its replacement, Team Foundation Server got rebranded as Azure DevOps; but the product's still around, 19 years later.


Yes, but it's source control shifted to git years ago (I think you can still use TFS, but it's strongly legacy ) and git is mich better than TFS ever was.


True on both counts. (They’re never going to be able to kill TFVC entirely, but it’s disabled for new projects by default, and they’re going to take away the switch to reenable it.)


This discussion was about git, not GitHub. There's a difference.


If git doesn't need a server, then why do you need Github?


GitHub won because it was free.




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