[tytso]

At the time Linus was the sole author/contributor of git, and he needed a replacement for BitKeeper in a hurry. BitKeeper had been made unavailable for Linux kernel development because the proprietor of BitKeeper was really unhappy that Tridge had reverse engineered the protocol and created an open-source client[1] which could talk to the Bitkeeper server. Linus created the first version of git sufficient to do a kernel commit in ten days[2].

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcepuller/

[2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/10-years-of-git-an-inte...

(As Tridge tells the story[3], he telnet'ed to the bk port and typed "help" so it wasn't that much of a reverse engineering effort. :-)

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/