Comment by init1

17 days ago

Git is an OSS project and is not owned even slightly by Microsoft.

Github the website however is.

You don't need to replace git.

I think I do need to replace it to gain a competitive advantage against an incumbent the size of Microsoft. But to replace it at all I would have to build something that is, at least in a few ways, much, much better, otherwise people wouldn't have any reason to give me a moment's consideration. This market has to be won over from the bottom up.

But yes, even though git is as FOSS as FOSS can be, to me it's still a crucial element of Microsoft's power. It has not escaped my notice that Github managed to turn a popular piece of OSS into a successful, profitable company. Apparently many young coders are surprised to learn that Git and GitHub are not the same thing...

  • Vendetta code is not going to get you far.

    git works perfectly well. git is an afterthought. Engineers need to know git the same way they need to know markdown or SQL.

    The complexity of git is becoming less relevant by the day as coding agents take over coding responsibilities.

    If your git replacement is optimized for LLM use in ways that git cannot be optimized, you may get some traction.

    By all conventional measures, git appears to be peak human-centered source control, with nearly every major company, software authoring tool, agent and SWE invested in using it.

    This may be one of the reddest oceans out there.

    • If I have two advantages it's that nobody else is crazy enough to try this, and I'm not doing it as a vendetta at all. It started out as a toy project; I was just pushing the boundaries of what was possible with streaming parsers for fun. I only realized much later that I'd accidentally solved problems that were critical to version control.

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