// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
Version Control Second Coming
The very same week we signed our first ever angel investor for Plastic SCM, in early summer of 2005, Linus Torvalds announced Git. I had spent more than a year pitching investors to build a new version control, and suddenly the creator of Linux was building one himself. That week I understood the road ahead was going to be much harder than I had anticipated.
I hadn’t felt that same electricity again in twenty years. Until a few months ago.
While we all stopped coding manually around December 2025, something else was cooking: the biggest revolution in version control since 2005.Two big pushes happening simultaneously: the need to handle a much higher commit pace due to agents, and a sudden urge to replace GitHub.I’m going to reflect about these two forces plus what we can probably expect in the near future from version control as it both adapts and supports new ways of developing software.
Fair warning: I’m anything but neutral. I spent twenty years competing against Git with Plastic SCM, I spent about two years advising Activision on their gigantic monorepo, I advise Diversion, and I now work at Origin making Git faster than anyone thought possible — so I’ve seen this fight from every corner of the ring.
If only 2 years ago somebody said GitHub would be no longer relevant soon, nobody would believe them. GitHub was the undisputed leader in repository hosting, and it also shaped the way developers thought about version control. Having spent too much time as a competitor (more about that later) I suffered that: if something was different than what people understood it was ‘the way GitHub does things’ it was probably wrong.GitHub is still gigantic in both repos and minds, and its impact in the world of software development and collaboration in general has been enormous, and most likely it will continue to be.But if you have been around long enough, you probably remember there was a time when nobody would bet against SourceForge, and only a couple of years later, with the rise of GitHub, it became largely irrelevant.Are we living now in the same transition moment? GitHub has done too many great things over the years, so I hope it remains, but there is obviously an earthquake going on.
If you’re reading this chances are you know I co-founded Plastic SCM, the version control that is not Git, back in 2005. It was all about performance and gigantic repos, and it was acquired by Unity in 2020.The first version control I used, though, was Visual Source Safe, in my first official job after university, back in 2000. Known as VSS it has been one of the most blamed version controls ever, but perspective taught me that it had some pretty good things too: extremely simple, and very easy to share files among projects, something probably yet not resolved.A few months later I had the chance to put my hands on Clearcase, by then acquired by IBM, when I joined Sony in Belgium to develop digital televisions. I was shocked at first, but Clearcase blew my mind. It had incredibly good branching and merging, virtual filesystems, and it was extremely flexible. I used it mostly from a Sun workstation, and I was lucky not to touch its “simplified” version back then (which in my opinion helped to kill it, since it shaved most of its power).Clearcase was extremely expensive, my memory tells me something around 5k/year per user for an enterprise setup.The version control bug bit me hard. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have something as powerful as Clearcase but more affordable so small companies could use it too? Then I learned Subversion and CVS, and even Perforce (which is still THE solution for many large game dev teams and chip makers).We started Plastic SCM in summer of 2005 after more than one year trying to create a business plan pitching potential investors.After that, I saw a good number of version controls come and go: Accurev was a fantastic solution we competed against many times, and it is now largely gone. Team Foundation Server from Microsoft,