It is my guess (though I have no proof) that most places with particularly large repositories have lots of binary files in them. It's hard to get a 15GB repository if you just have text.
This sort of thing suggests a centralized check-in/check-out model, because binary files are difficult to merge sensibly, and nobody wants to spend terabytes of hard drive space storing the repository locally. And your centralized check-in/check-out needs, whatever scale they might be, are probably tolerably well served by one of the existing solutions.
Yes, but why is that a show stopper? It's a small market filled only with people who typically have large fist-fulls of cash and are dependent on version control. It's a small market, but companies in it have the resources for a good solution.
Because those companies generally already pay the $$$ for Perforce (which has any number of deeply terrifying, shiny red candylike self destruct buttons and makes git's user interface look kind) which for all its other faults handles this specific user case extremely well.
And also paying Perforce fistfuls of cash in licensing fees. I hear that Perforce is a quite a small company, and the founder wrote the lion's share of the code a couple decades ago.
I think they are probably on par with craigslist in profits per employee (i.e. much higher than Google or Facebook. Interestingly I think Facebook has about 1/10 the employees of Google with 1/10 the profits -- off the top of my head feel free to correct -- so I don't think they blew it out of the park with their IPO filing).
Perforce is quite expensive, yes. I don't understand the rest of your comments though. I'm not sure why company size, code author, or profit margins are relevant. Perforce is used by every major gaming studio, Pixar, Nvidia, and many more.
If I were to make a snarky comment it would be that Git is for poor people and Perforce is what you use when you grow up. That's not an even remotely reasonable statement, but it does have a teeny, tiny hint of truth to it. :)
I'm just pointing out the Perforce is making crazy profit, and somewhat ironically it's doing so more efficiently (I conjecture) than Facebook, which you are hearing a lot more about.
Perforce is a great system, but it's showing it's age by now. I think there is probably room for someone to make another product in the high end space and make boatloads of cash from big companies, but it's not easy.
Yes partly. Doing lots of commits locally before pushing to others is definitely something I like.
Another part of it is working disconnected -- with so many people coding on their laptops that's actually a pretty common use case.
Also the lack of need to do sysadmin work on git/hg is really nice. I used to run the free Perforce server a long time ago for myself, but it was annoying to do the backups. With git or hg you get whole-repository backups for free.
The "big repository with all dependencies model" has its drawbacks but it's interesting that facebook finds a lot of use for it, and that git is unsuitable for it. Perforce is probably still their best choice in that case.
The most recent version of Perforce added streams which is their primary answer to git and hg. Easy creation, management, and switching between branches. I've only used this at home and not in a large scale environment yet, but it's promising.
Later this year they are adding p4 Sandbox which allows for disconnected work. When that is complete and working I'm honestly not sure what advantage git will have left other than being free.
Perforce just raised their limit on the free version to 20 users and 20 workspaces, it used to be 2 users. We use it at Tinkercad and have been very happy, I used it at Google previously. The price (free) is acceptable for almost any small development organization.
If you have used ClearCase, you will know that while it's a great solution to a "what shall we do with our buckets of cash" problem, it's not something that anyone encountering performance problems would reach for.
