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I see 2 huge barriers for a new commercial VCS:

1. Devs don't like to pay for core tools. And VCSes need network effects.

2. VCSes seem to be really hard.



Totally agree, it won't be easy. Companies do pay for GitHub/GitLab/Perforce though, and for indie devs there's the free tier. I think what made git really take off is actually GitHub's free tier/OS hosting, and not git itself being free (at least for parts of the market, and I might be wrong).

100% correct about VCS development, it's much harder than one can expect.


> Companies do pay for GitHub/GitLab/Perforce though

Those products also provide a huge amount of other value and functionality (though at a high price).

As someone who worked at a (mobile) game dev studio, this "what if Dropbox but Git?" product design really hits for me. Teaching our artists to use Google Drive or Team Drives was easy, but the functionality isn't there. Teaching them to use SVN was a nightmare (because SVN workflows are a nightmare) but the functionality is... also not really there?

Give me either a local installation that I can set up in my office or a local proxy to reduce download speeds (or peer-to-peer on local network, the way Dropbox does it) and I could see this being beneficial for a lot of especially smaller studios.


As someone who is making one (not Diversion), I agree with both of your points.

Do you think that a VCS that solves the large file problem and binary file problem could succeed?




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