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Git (not github) was built for bazaar style decentralized development where people might contribute a single patch or two, and it scales really well (see Linux). People don’t even need an account to contribute, they can just send a patch via email.

Fossil was built for cathedral style development, where you’re a small team of trusted contributors. You get offline first issue tracker, wiki, forum, chat etc. out of the box and integrated into an easy to backup solution. Allegedly it doesn’t scale as well though.

With hosted services like Github, I feel like fossil doesn’t buy much more than offline first capability and simpler to use. However if you self host, fossil is dead simple run (single binary) and to backup due to it generating a single SQLite file and it’s easy to stream changes elsewhere. Setting up git with gitolite, email list, issue tracker etc is much harder (though I’ve heard gitea is easy to use).




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