It's great to see some moves to break up this great calcification around git. Gut greatest contribution to version control was stagnation. The space was evolving with great fresh ideas before git became a quasi-religion among the early adopters because Linus made it in a day and therefore it must be great or something. I'm exaggerating somewhat, but the zeal of some people back then was next level annoying.
Beyond that, git has a great deal of shortcomings, some obvious, some subtle. It was a regression against SVN in some ways and inferior to Mercurial in others. But the strengths of SCN and Mercurial are again vastly different. There is a reason SVN isn't dead.
My biggest gripe with the open source VCSes is that in the last 20 years, no meaningful evolution happened in the established tools, especially around any weaknesses. Commercial systems like Plastic and Perforce as well as proprietary solutions like piper/jujutsu and sapling show that the tools can still improve drastically. I'm excited for a future where we get better open tools for the masses.
I don't think jujutsu is proprietary (unless you want to redefine that term). Source is freely available, and it uses Apache License 2.0.
While you're right about the disadvantages of git, pretending that it became ubiquitous because it "became a quasi-religion because Linus made it in a day" is selling short its advantages. If you think about it for even just a little bit, it should be obvious what a simplistic statement that it. Also, git was not the stagnation you make it out to be. Even with its warts, it was a breath of fresh air, not unlike jujutsu is now a breath of fresh air vs git.
I remember working with SVN, and all things considered, git was a vast net improvement. Git took a lot of pain away. It made working with a versioned code base faster and simpler, to the point of enabling much better collaborative software development. There's a reason we got GitHub and not SVNhub. And GitHub was what helped git become so dominant.
Would it have been better if Mercurial had beat out git in the propularity contest? Possibly? There's trade-offs between the two, but Mercurial's easier interface counts for a lot. But if it had won, I'm sure we'd be griping about its shortcomings by now.
So yeah, I'm also happy to see some movement around the ergonomics of version control, but I don't understand the need to disparage the tools that got us where we are. It just seems that you're more bitter than happy, and like you're letting that bitterness cloud your judgment.
The combination jujutsu/piper is proprietary. As I understand it, sapling as released is also not the entire internal system used at Meta.
Git was an improvement over SVN in some aspects, but a monumental regression in others. There are no two ways around that.
Mercurial is better than git in a bunch of ways. It is much more usable because it has way fewer footguns. But it has some of the same shortcomings as git when compared to SVN. I won't call it perfect.
The reason we didn't get svnhub is that some git fanboy nabbed the domain and essentially said "you shall not have it". Joking aside, there was Sourceforge with working SVN support. But I would say that Sourceforge lost market share for a lot of reasons, not all of them technical. Wrapping Windows downloads in adware installers was only one of those many crazy unforced errors.
Am I bitter? Maybe, because I have to use tools that could be so much better. I've experienced better and every time I am forced back to git, it feels a bit painful because I know what we could have instead. If am bitter, it is because of my experience with a wide range of tools.
Well, then I'm sorry. Your issue seems not so much that tools have shortcomings, but rather, that you seem to focus on these shortcomings so much that everything looks like crap. Maybe not in general, but at least in relation to VCSes, it sure seems like you carry around some emotional reasons that give you brown-tinted glasses, so to speak.
As a point in case, it's certainly interesting to see you completely disregard jujutsu because it happens to also work (optionally!) with a proprietary backend, when its more useful, and non-proprietary feature is that it makes working with git night-and-day better. This thing could be a ray of light for you, but for some curious reason, you seem to go out of your way to ignore it.
I mean, it's definitely possible that you think to this day that SVN was the bee's knees and its demise in favor of git or mercurial made us all poorer, but that's certainly a rare perspective. In that context, I'm also finding it hard to reconcile your initial statement around the calcification in VCS land, and now it sounds like you would have preferred to stick with SVN instead.
I'm sure you can give me a rationale for it all, but I wonder how much of it will be just picking rotten (or declared-rotten) cherries out of an otherwise tasty pile. If you stack up the present against a rosy-tinted version of the past and some inexistent pie-in-the-sky, it's no surprise it comes up wanting; but that's just a way to make yourself unhappy, really.
... next, GNU please. /s