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A discussion amongst some colleagues emerged recently how in today's software industry, two separate worlds exist:

  1. FOSS oriented
  2. Corporate

Question

How much is Git used in corporate environments?

What is your experience with Git in a corporate environment?

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Rook
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  • Only corporate and free? What about startups and small contracting firms? – tster Oct 16 '09 at 14:40
  • @tster: I think dividing into corporate/non-corporate is quite reasonable. Even startups and small contracting firms pay their developers, and tend to favor closed-source proprietary code. – Cascabel Oct 16 '09 at 14:48
  • hmm, yes, i didn't think of those (and probably many others). however, although they're not open source, nor free - i was more aiming at systems where programmers are somewhat restricted in something of this type. – Rook Oct 16 '09 at 14:50
  • @Jefromi - you put it down better than myself. – Rook Oct 16 '09 at 14:51
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    Let's pare the question down to what you're asking -- the rest of it just makes it seem argumentative. – George Stocker Oct 16 '09 at 15:05
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    @George Stocker - Why, yes George, thank you for asking. I do mind when my question is being edited, expecially if no useful information is added to it. – Rook Nov 13 '09 at 22:31

6 Answers6

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For what it's worth, we use git in my workplace. Everyone is quite happy with it. Of course, no single person is really going to be able to tell you how common it is.

I suspect the continued prevalence of cvs/svn is much more to do with inertia than anything else. They were definitely among the best (if not the best) choices for a long time**, and a large number of developers have had the chance to learn to use them well. If most of your workforce is already comfortable with them, and they're good enough, how many companies can we really expect to try something new?

Another common factor in corporations' decisions has to do with a sort of stigma attached to free software. People tend to associate monetary cost and value, perceiving more expensive products as better (For example, I've read about a psychology study where people were given the same wine twice, and told one was a more expensive variety. They tended to rate it as tasting better). With software, there is a certain amount truth to this attitude - you can often buy some guarantee of support and maintenance with a product. We all know established open-source projects can easily still win out (more testers, more documentation writers, faster bugfix releases...), but I'm sure this still motivates many companies to purchase VCS/SCM products. However, this is clearly not the reason people are using cvs/svn.

** Please, no flamewars! I'm a diehard git fan, but I know it hasn't always existed. Of course, some still disagree, like Linus Torvalds:

For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much superior source control management system than CVS ... The slogan of Subversion for a while was "CVS done right", or something like that, and if you start with that kind of slogan, there's nowhere you can go. There is no way to do CVS right.

tshepang
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Cascabel
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    good answer! although, much of what you say is true (and I beg of all who read this <-- read twice the statement about the flamewar! :) - i also wonder whether one of the reasons it is not used is that it's not standardized in the way of support, doesn't have some real financial support (you can always sue another company etc.) ... this argument goes not only for git, but for many similar examples (the whole linux os market). – Rook Oct 16 '09 at 14:55
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I don't think it's an opinion that matters, but facts. Also, closed source companies do not usually like to reveal the details of their internal architecture. So... I don't think there is a complete and correct answer to this question.

Vladislav Rastrusny
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  • i agree. therefore the cw. but i'd still like to hear people opinions, and maybe if someone knows an example where the opposite *is true* – Rook Oct 16 '09 at 14:38
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For newly established companies or companies that have never used version control before, there is no migration cost to git.

And for novice developers, git is more suitable because the senior developers/manager can guide them to "manipulate" better revision history before pushing to central server. Tell them to git commit --amend if they find anything wrong in the history.

If CVCS is used, chaos may happen when multiple users committed their code. There is nowhere to practise how to produce a good commit.

The only concern is the revision number, if you need that number as product version number. Because git use hash. You may need git describe or other method as a workaround.

linquize
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Came across this while looking for a way to use Git at my workplace. Sorry to disappoint but I am not "against" free software, it just that Git will not work for us without help. You might have some insight into Git's short coming if you tried to understand before calling names.

Pat O
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I don't know, but we use Microsoft Visual Source Safe 6.0. They are looking into buying the new version. When I proposed git or svn, they hand-waved telling me that they were free (as in beer), therefore bad.

I can expect corporations to use any POS that there is around and cost money ever since.

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Esteban Küber
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    I though VSS was banned in most countries by the Geneva Convention? You have my deepest sympathies. – Martin Beckett Oct 16 '09 at 15:17
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    If you have to use version control from Microsoft, use Visual Studio Team System. From what I have heard Visual Source Safe is a joke of version control system. – Jakub Narębski Oct 16 '09 at 15:53
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    Trust me, it's a joke worthy of The Joker. – Esteban Küber Oct 16 '09 at 16:41
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    I would give you a hug in the most heterosexual, sympathetic way possible. How many times has VSS eaten your source? – jocull Nov 07 '10 at 04:01
  • @voyager : create your own company that sells git for a lot of money, and sell it to your employers. They will be happy to use a product that costs money. Every body is happy ! The beauty of free software (as in free spech :p) – Dolanor Jan 23 '13 at 09:05
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Disclaimer: the above post is just my humble opinion, I do not know how decisions are made.

I suspect that the force behind not moving to git is not "free is evil" but huge migration costs. Should a big corporation try to migrate to another system ir risks breaking something.

Monetary return of moving to better system should be predicted and compared with direct (easy to calculate) and indirect (temporary productivity loss, breaking build progress, integration with bug tracking system...) costs. Since no-one knows to calculate the indirect costs decision makers may prefer to assume that the costs are huge.

Muxecoid
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  • One big difference between Git and SVN (and similar repos) is that Git is 1 repo = 1 project (usually). On SVN you can have one repo with loads of projects without asking your admins to setup a new repo and give everyone access and waiting a week for the whole process to happen. With our SVN we make a new project directory, branch/tag/trunk it and roll from there. I personally prefer it that way. SVN is easier for some users (read: designers) on our team to understand, in that it's very centralized. – jocull Nov 07 '10 at 04:04