rel:: [[Software Engineering|Software Engineering MOC]] # distributed version control ## History Bitbucket and [[GitHub]] both launched in 2008, central mercurial (hg) and [[git]] repos as-a-service respectively. Both hg and git themselves were announced within days of each other in 2005, both DVCS, both open source. It wasn't obvious at the time that git would achieve its current dominance. Hg is a bit more user friendly and doesn't add wrinkles like git's staging area. Large open source projects like [[OpenJDK]] and Mozilla adopted it. But [[Linux]]' using [[git]] and [[GitHub]]'s superior execution to Bitbucket made the difference. Two years after launch, Bitbucket sold to Atlassian which I think negatively impacted Hg's adoption too.