The current (and pretty much only, ever, despite Linus having been the creator) maintainer of git is a google employee [1], in case anyone else was wondering.
>"Linus Torvalds said in 2012 that one of his own biggest successes was recognizing how good a developer Hamano was on Git, and trusting him to maintain it."
Yeah, that was my reaction, and it made me sad that Google has so eroded my trust over the decades that I was turned off at seeing an announcement implying they are deeply involved in core open source tools. I mean, who else but companies swimming in cash can truly deeply support this stuff, and for the most part, the people working on these tools really do care about the open source community. But Google's reputation is so tarnished that my gut reaction is at odds with my rational one, and that's a sad thing to realize.
I wasn't aware that the maintainer of Git works at Google, so I was a bit surprised by the announcement too. But it wasn't because of any drama like Google eroding my trust or whatnot, just that my information was incomplete so my gut reaction was irrational.
That may seen odd, but it could happen in a open-source world: multiple parties releasing different versions of the same piece of software and calling it the same.
They could skip a version like PHP did. Among other reasons, since books and articles about PHP 6 had already been written long before PHP 5+1 came out, they went with 7.
"Initially, nobody registered it, but on August 15, 1994, [...] filed for the trademark Linux, and then demanded royalties from Linux distributors. In 1996, Torvalds and some affected organizations sued him to have the trademark assigned to Torvalds, and, in 1997, the case was settled." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright,_trademark_and...
Some licences require a change of name for substantial modifications, e.g. the Artistic Licence and Apache Licence v1. But those kinds of clauses are pretty rare nowadays.
Alright, I was wondering why this was published on the Google Opensource website. I had no idea. Yet, the Git project itself has not been published under their umbrella.
We currently only list project that are or were primarily developed by Google. We decided to include projects that started at Google and were since donated to foundations, such as Kubernetes.
But we aren't yet including projects where we are just heavy contributors, but they're not "Google projects". That includes Linux, git, LLVM, and a host of others. We do want to recognize them in our project directory, but want to make sure that they are distinguished from Google projects so that we're not implying something that is accurate.