I don't think your Github example is accurate. The vast majority of developers started using git after Github became a thing. They may have used svn or another type of collaboration system before, but not git. And the main reason they started using git is because Github was such massive value on top of git, not because git was so amazing.
My memories are different. Git became amazing on it's own and was a big advantage over SVN. GitHub was "a open source" thing in the beginning. No company here had the idea to host proprietary closed source code on another platform they do not have control over. This eventually became a thing later though and the mindset shifted.
I think you're both right. Post-Github, a lot of Git's adoption came from Github. But Github "worked" because a lot of people were already using Git and Github offered them amazing value, and that initial userbase created a viral effect: People increasingly came into contact with Github via projects hosted there, and those who did not already use Git picked it up as a result of that.
And now many companies do have the idea of hosting proprietary code on a shitty, buggy, closed-source platform they have no control over. Indeed a shifted mindset. Maybe it wasn't shitty, buggy and closed-source enough before.
> And the main reason they started using git is because Github was such massive value on top of git, not because git was so amazing.
Github has always been mediocre and forgettable outside of convenience that you might already have an account on the site. Svn was just shitty compared to git, and cvs was a crime against humanity.
I have to hard disagree on that. I know of many developers personally who were on Source Forge and Google Code before and migrated to GitHub specifically because they offered git
I don't think SVN and Mercurial were more widely used than git before Github became popular, but Github definitely killed off most of the use of those.
Git had already replaced perforce and svn most everywhere I'd seen, before GitHub came along. CVS was still horrible and in a lot, though.
I mean, git was '05 and GitHub was '08, so not like the stats will say much one way or another.
StackOverflow only added it their survey in 2015. No source of truth, only anecdotes.
Lots of people were using svn and mercurial was also coming up around the time that GitHub launched. Both git and GitHub were superior to all the other options but for many people they did the switch to GitHub and git at the same time.
Yeah, whilst git was more popular than mercurial, I still think mercurial would have won if bitbucket had a better UI.
It's interesting to me that the only thing that made me vastly prefer using Github over bitbucket is that Github prioritised showing the readme over showing the source tree. Such a little thing, but it made all the difference.
