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I was looking at google trends for bitbucket and github, and it seems bitbucket leads github in Romania, Bulgaria, and Latvia. Why is this so? Are there any historical reasons for this?

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bitbucket is for Mercurial while github is for Git; so i wonder if its because Hg was better marketed there? – Dan D. Mar 22 '11 at 0:49
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To the extent that open source does "marketing", it's very rarely country-specific. – Greg Hewgill Mar 22 '11 at 1:04
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I for one like Hg much more as it operates great on Windows (central repo server). Git works better on Linux systems. Tried it on Windows, but it is/was a pain to get a central repo server working (with multiple repos). Also a reason why I use bitbucket now and not github. – Jan_V Mar 22 '11 at 6:52
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@Greg Hewgill, there is certainly some form of "marketing". I've heard a lot of anti-git FUD stuff specifically from the easern europeans, as well as a lot of the Mercurial praise. – SK-logic Mar 22 '11 at 10:47
@Greg Hewgill - It seems that way at first sight, but one has got to admit some very interesting anomalyes with regards to some countries/some software. For example, I once stumbled onto a site that showed where in europe are the largest linux user bases of some distros - some very interesting "spikes" were in there. – Rook Apr 12 '11 at 0:20
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Mar 22 '11 at 0:56

2 Answers

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This is a well educated guess, but still a guess.

This has a lot to do with Mercurial's close ties to the Linux development community. Originally, Mercurial was a direct competitor to Git for the position of being the DVCS that the kernel used. Git won, but Mercurial did gain quite a following.

Some of the biggest champions of HG were sub system maintainers or contributors who happened to live in Eastern Europe. It's been a while and I don't remember exactly who they were, additionally anyone who reads every single message that comes across the kernel development mailing list is either insane, Linus or both.

Anyway, through blogs, conferences & talks, cult followings and the occasional stalker, Mercurial developed quite a following there. Bit Bucket was one of the first services that catered to Mercurial users that actually showed promise of remaining stable, so naturally it became popular.

But, you're not just looking at the popularity of Bit Bucket, you're also looking at one of the first major endorsers of Mercurial. Incidentally, there are still some HG repositories found on kernel.org.

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"is either insane, Linus or both." nice .. – Muhammad Alkarouri Dec 11 '12 at 8:44
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I had the same question for similar situations when I was living in a small country (Greece). You never know what happened exactly, it is many times circumstantial.

When the market is smaller, it is easier for something to propagate some times, get traction become de-facto and that's it. Imaginary example, a small country with only two pure technical blogs. For some reason both bloggers liked bitbucket. After that people that needed such a service created an account there. Now everyone else had to use it. I have seen something like that many times over.

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