Winning and &#x27;being dead&#x27; are two things that mean different things to different people.<p>Git has at least an order of magnitude more people use it, and there is a significant and growing ecosystem around it that mercurial does not have.<p>Mercurial is not going to &#x27;die&#x27; until the developers abandon it; you can still use and install it. Hell, even cvs isn&#x27;t &#x27;dead&#x27;, and the last stable release was in 2008.<p>Mercurial will also continue to &#x27;not be dead&#x27; for the foreseeable future, and people will use it for years to come.<p>...but it is already niche, and will increasingly become so.<p>Only time will tell, but I&#x27;d be shocked if you don&#x27;t see more big name migrations away from hg over the next year or two.<p>People are important.<p>When your project forces them to use tools that don&#x27;t like or don&#x27;t know, they go else where. The impetus to change gathers more slowly in companies; but when you see announcements like this, like google code, like atlassian marginalizing hg, like cpython... it&#x27;s crazy to suggest that it doesn&#x27;t affect the way people think about mercurial.