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

A FOSDEM 2026 talk examining Mercurial's 20-year history as a distributed version control system. Despite losing the popularity battle to Git in the 2010s and being widely considered dead, Mercurial remains actively developed with modern tooling, sustained funding, and an influential community. The talk explores how Mercurial survived, its hidden influence on tools like Sapling and Jujutsu, the impact of large company involvement, and what its story means for the future of version control and community-driven open source.