All of these developers prefer git/GitHub. Can anybody offer any reason why (religious wars aside) this beats Hg/Bitbucket?
As far as I can tell, Bitbucket has unlimited free private repos, the same pull-request and team features, and has been around pretty much as long as GitHub.
You can use git on BitBucket. As a matter of fact, I use BitBucket for my private projects. The benefit of using GitHub for public projects, on the other hand, is that it provides better visibility : more users, and possibly more contributors. It's the same kind of reason why people use facebook and not google+ (technical differences aside).
I'm not a git expert, but afaik it's easy to setup a project to be visible on both BitBucket and GitHub if need be.
Honestly I think it's mainly due to the fact that git and github have a greater mindshare than hg and bitbucket.
That said I think either choice is great, they are solid and mature implementations of the DVCS paradigm and are miles ahead of older systems like SVN. I use a mix of both personally, hg at work and git/github for personal projects.
completely my own observation here, but...
Bitbucket may see an increase in user awareness due to the MOOCs. Reason being, if you're taking a programming related course, it's good to put your code in vc and online vc's let you easily switch between work stations. (myself, I use three different computers on any one personal project)
Github is out of the question for most, since there are no free private repos.
I've seen bitbucket recommended on the forums a fair few times because of the free private repos. Meaning students are getting exposure to bitbucket, meaning their market share may slightly tick up.
I think entire giant essays have been written about this topic. However, it boils down to a few things. Mercurial tends to choke on large repositories. Git doesn't. A lot of people know git. Not many people know mercurial.
People like to bitch about git's command-line interface. But most of the quirks have been ironed out over time. What you're left with is a very UNIX-y program. If you understand the concepts then you will figure it out. git also has pretty good Windows support now, thanks to the GitHub client and others.
I don't know much about Github versus BitBucket (or any other site.) I use GitHub because we use it at work and because I found it first. BitBucket now supports git repos, which might make it a contender. I get the feeling that you're more likely to get contributors if you start on GitHub, simply because people are more familiar with the site's interface. But nothing I put on Github has become mega-popular at this point, so I don't know.
Early on git got a lot of traction, and I think this was largely due to github being so, so good.
Since the acquisition, bitbucket has come a long way in a short space of time, and I'm sure they're clawing back some marketshare. Now that they have forking, pull requests and git repos, there's no reason not to use them.
For some reason though, I still find it easier to browse / read / review code on github.
I once used this type of a list to go through job postings and list the most in-demand skills companies are looking for. On a larger scale that for example would be a good resource.
As far as I can tell, Bitbucket has unlimited free private repos, the same pull-request and team features, and has been around pretty much as long as GitHub.
What am I missing out on?