Comment by dboreham

Yes, article seems to miss this. I believe (at the time, and still) that git won because the cost to host the server side of it is orders of magnitude lower than the competitors (svn, perforce, etc). All those other revision control systems ended up with a big server cost that couldn't justify a free hosting service. Plus git provided a reasonable (but still not great) solution to "decentralized development", which none of the others attempted to do.