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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: 20 Years Of Git
Date: Fri, 11 Apr 2025 01:33:50 -0000 (UTC)
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Followup article
<https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-built-git-in-10-days-and-never-imagined-it-would-last-20-years/>
on the sequence of events that led to the creation of Git. By about
2003, he had embraced BitKeeper, which was a proprietary version
control system. He brushed off criticisms by saying he was a
pragmatist, who would use whatever worked, regardless of how it was
licensed. This notwithstanding the fact that he had licensed the Linux
kernel itself under the GPL, which has long been associated with
certain, um, software politics.

His mistake was in assuming that he could agree to the BitKeeper
licence on behalf of the entire Free Software community. So when
Andrew Tridgell was commissioned to reverse-engineer the protocol,
with a view to extracting data into a non-proprietary format, Torvalds
felt he could order Tridgell to stop.

Tridgell responded in the, shall we say, predictable fashion (can you
say “nose-thumbing”?). Which led Larry McVoy, boss of BitMover, the
company that made and sold BitKeeper, to issue notice of termination
of the licence for the Linux kernel developers to use his product.

Torvalds went off to think about this for a couple of weeks, and came
back with the beginnings of Git.

Today, Git is absolutely dominant in the version-control sphere. Given
that it was created informally by a bunch of smart software hackers,
and the competition at the time mainly consisted of large,
complicated, expensive products created by companies with large
marketing budgets, it is absolutely surprising that it was able to
leave them all behind in the dust. What happened to Microsoft’s own
Team Foundation Server and Visual SourceSafe products? Seems Microsoft
itself is now using Git for managing its own software development.
That’s how complete the ascendancy of Git has become.