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

99.99999% of projects are not the Linux kernel, so how could Git have succeeded because of Linus, other than Linus originating the genius design of it? The Ruby community jumped onto Git even though there was no Github, and Ruby itself didn't use Git. In my opinion it was because Git was the first tool that was superior to SVN in every way.

The first time I used Git I swore I would never use SVN again. It was even popular back then to set up git+svn systems so you could work on your git repo, and push a branch to svn to satisfy your employer.

People associate git with Github (and Gitlab), but it used to be very common to just set up a ssh server that people could push projects on to, my server still has a dozen or so projects on it that I haven't touched in a decade. Github spawned from the popularity of Git in the Ruby community, and the desire to make it a little more accessible to people that didn't want to have their own git servers.

> so how could Git have succeeded because of Linus, other than Linus originating the genius design of it?

Perhaps that is exactly the point. There was a fair amount of hype and press coverage over Git when it was first unveiled. And it was because Linus wrote it, and wrote it in an unexpectedly short time. And it was on the coattails of the whole Bitkeeper saga.

Similar to how, say, Go and Rust became popular while nim and D have largely remained niche products

PS: Hi, Steve!