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by shiroiushi 718 days ago
Yes, Linus Torvalds developed git because the Linux kernel at the time used Bitkeeper, a proprietary source control system and its owner was changing the license. Now, everyone and their goldfish uses git, and I haven't heard about Bitkeeper in many years.

It hasn't completely obliterated all the competition, but most of it, and those that aren't dead are on life support: in the open-source domain, CVS is mostly dead, SVN isn't far behind, and Mercurial is barely hanging on. In the proprietary domain, it seems only stodgy long-time enterprise customers still use Perforce and ClearCase, and MS's SourceSafe seems to be dead (and MS even bought GitHub).
1 comments
chuckadams 718 days ago
Linus didn’t write git because the BitKeeper license had changed exactly, he did it because Larry McVoy yanked Linux off the platform after Andrew Tridgell (of Samba and rsync fame) started poking around at the protocol to reverse engineer it. It turned out BK was so buggy that that alone was enough to corrupt other repos on the server, so McVoy just went and disabled Linux’s access without warning.

Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason) and named his replacement for what he thought of them. Now you know.

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hulitu 717 days ago
> Linus was pretty steamed at the participants in that debacle (especially Tridge for some reason)

The reason was that Tridge was trying to build an OSS alternative to BK.

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chuckadams 717 days ago
Not that that made Tridge in any way deserving of Linus's ire ... but I guess Linus was upset to see his personal friend McVoy go off like this, and blamed who they saw as the instigator. Not the best reaction all told, but understandable human behavior regardless. Of course, the actually meaningful response was that he wrote Git, so it's all just ancient history now. I doubt there's any hard feelings left between any of the parties, or at least I like to think so.
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shiroiushi 717 days ago
You'd like to think so, but I wonder what McVoy thinks about it all. After all, before that, he had Bitkeeper which was his business, which had the distinction and fame of being used for the Linux kernel project. Now, who even remembers BK?
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