Fossil started as "not invented here", but it has grown into something I like a lot more than Git. Knowing how to use a version control system should be an incidental skill (akin to simple shell commands like "cp" and "ln"), not something that needs to be mentioned in a job posting's role description.

I also appreciate that the default workflow for undoing bad merges is a whiteout rather than a true "delete".

To each his own, but having worked with CVS, SVN, Perforce, Git, and Fossil, the centralized model is much less work for release engineering and administration most of the time. If I were a maintainer of the Linux kernel of one of the many Linux distros where you have potentially thousands of contributors to one codebase, I would use git because it scales up better.

However, I wouldn't underestimate the value of scaling down well, especially for all the people around here building some startup out of a barndominium. A VCS that includes its own GUI-based admin tool and is simple enough to used by some high school intro to web design class is a good thing in my book.

I was turned off by the necessity of using users and permissions; it feels unnecessary for local development and kind of a PITA if you have many repos.

It works exactly as advertised though; my gripes aren't technical.