Mercurial at 20: Why the VCS Git Fans Wrote Off Is Still Shipping

A FOSDEM 2026 talk takes on the widespread assumption that Mercurial died when Git won the distributed version control wars in the 2010s. The reality is messier: the project has been continuously developed since 2005, funded, and quietly influential, spawning adjacent tooling and ideas that have shaped how modern VCS work — often used by people who don’t realize Mercurial is upstream of what they touch.

The speakers plan to walk through specific inflection points in the project’s history, including how corporate involvement from large companies reshaped priorities, why contributors still arrive in 2025, and what kept the codebase competitive while mindshare drained to Git. They draw on firsthand experience rather than retrospective narrative.

The broader pitch is about community-driven open source surviving market loss. Mercurial’s case argues that losing the popularity contest is not the same as losing relevance, and the talk uses it to make predictions about where version control goes next.