Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking?

Mercurial is a Distributed Version Control System created in 2005.

The project has been constantly active since then, fostering modern tooling, introducing new ideas, spawning multiple recent tools from its community, keeping itself competitive, and with sustained funding for its development. However nowadays, most people we encounter remember Mercurial for losing the popularity battle to its sibling Git in the 2010s and think the project dead.

This talk confronts this paradox. How did Mercurial get itself in such a situation? What can everyone learn from it? What does this mean for the future of version control?

Using our first hand knowledge of Mercurial's history, we look at a selection of events, contributor profiles, technical and community aspects, to see how they've affected the project's course.

We will focus on topics that we have been asked about most frequently, such as: * How has Mercurial weathered the Git storm? * Which impacts has Mercurial had on your life, unbeknownst to you? * How has the involvement from behemoth companies reshaped the project? * What brings people to Mercurial in 2025?

Finally, we leverage the knowledge extracted from our past, to assess the present state of version control, try to predict its future, and highlight how community-based open-source remains as relevant as ever.