Dolt is Git for data

Only 39 days since the last "GitHub for data" was announced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22375774

I'll say what I said in February: I started a company with the same premise 9 years ago, during the prime "big data" hype cycle. We burned through a lot of investor money only to realize that there was not a market opportunity to capture. That is, many people thought it was cool - we even did co-sponsored data contests with The Economist - but at the end of the day, we couldn't find anyone with an urgent problem that they were willing to pay to solve.

I wish these folks luck! Perhaps things have changed; we were part of a flock of 5 or 10 similar projects and I'm pretty sure the only one still around today is Kaggle.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWMjQhhxhQ4

Git succeeded because it was free, and then business models were able to be built up around the open-source ecosystem after a market evolved naturally. There is a need, but if you go into it trying to build a business from scratch, you're going to have a bad time.

Git succeeded because of Linus.

Sure as hell wasn't because of the UX, else Mercurial would have won, or even DARCS.

99.99999% of projects are not the Linux kernel

Git exists, because Bitkeeper were being Aholes. [1] A developer needed some metrics on the Bitkeeper repository that Linux used. Remember this is a proprietary and commercial product that granted a handful of licenses to the Linux community as a token of support. So when Andrew Tridgell reversed engineered the format that Bitkeeper used, they threatened to sue him under the DMCA.

This caused a firestorm, some defended him, others defended Bitkeeper, and a lot of people said why the hell is Linus using proprietary software to manage an Open Source project?!?!! Linus waded in and said he'd think about it, I think was on a thursday or friday, and by the next week he had working python prototype of git. [2] The rest is history. Bitkeeper faded into irrelevance and git became the lingua franca for open source projects. Arguably its biggest strength was not revision control, but being designed in manner that many collaborators could seamlessly commit changes for merging. Obviously architected to fulfill the time consuming requirements of Linus Torvalds, it has stood a test of time. I'm writing this from memory, so if it disagrees with Wikipedia take it with a grain of salt.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper#Original_license_con... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git#History

Events like this, even in the small, keep me from outright dismissing "hero based" (whatever it's called) theories of explaining history.

Coincidences, accidents, grudges, misunderstandings coupled with path dependencies.