>My suspicion is that open source projects tend towards Git because of GitHub but I think a lot of companies who don't have the option of external code hosting lean towards Mercurial.
GitHub is a consequence not the cause (ponder for a moment why there is no MercurialHub...) It is about ability to choose best source control tool for multi-versioned distributed concurrent development. Open source devs have such choice while corporate ones - no. FB choosing Mercurial tells a lot about environment there.
That makes no sense. Facebook specifically said they might have chosen git! They had the same choices as any developer except that a) they don't care about github, and b) they wanted to modify the VCS to support massive scale. Apparently out of git and mercurial, mercurial is easier to extend.
Bitbucket never supported svn (and still doesn't), it was created with django + uses the pure python mercurial (It was one of the major "posterchild" stories for django).
I suspect many of us use Git because it was made by Linus Torvalds ( I think everyone agrees that he is a great developer) and is used in the Linux kernel. If it can handle that, then you can be pretty sure it will handle whatever you throw at it (unless you are Facebook, it seems).
Add Github to that mix and you can see why so many developers sleep like babies at night. Of course it's not rigorous, but the choice is not irrational.
GitHub is a consequence not the cause (ponder for a moment why there is no MercurialHub...) It is about ability to choose best source control tool for multi-versioned distributed concurrent development. Open source devs have such choice while corporate ones - no. FB choosing Mercurial tells a lot about environment there.