[bananapub]

since it seems it has been forgotten, remember the reason Git was created is that Larry McVoy, who ran BitMover, which had been donating proprietary software licenses for BitKeeper to core kernel devs, got increasingly shirty at people working on tools to make BK interoperate with Free tools, culminating in Tridge showing in an LCA talk that you could telnet to the BK server and it would just spew out the whole history as SCCS files.

Larry shortly told everyone he wasn't going to keep giving BK away for free, so Linus went off for a weekend and wrote a crappy "content manager" called git, on top of which perhaps he thought someone might write a proper VC system.

and here we are.

a side note was someone hacking the BitKeeper-CVS "mirror" (linear-ish approximation of the BK DAG) with probably the cleverest backdoor I'll ever see: https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2013/10/09/the-linux-backdoo...

see if you can spot the small edit that made this a backdoor:

if ((options == (__WCLONE|__WALL)) && (current->uid = 0)) retval = -EINVAL;

[mjcarden]

I think that was the first time I ever saw Tridge deliver a conference presentation and it was to a packed lecture theatre at the ANU. He described how he 'hacked' BitKeeper by connecting to the server via telnet and using the sophisticated hacker tools at his disposal to convince Bitkeeper to divulge its secrets, he typed:

help

The room erupted with applause and laughter.

[harry8]

Every single action, including Telnet, including typing help, the nc command, was suggested by the audience with Tridgell prompting with a minimal “how are we going to find out…”

A bk client was hacked by the audience in 2 minutes.

It was the most devastating take down I’ve ever seen of the attacks. Linus later said the “git” wasn’t Tridgell at all, but in fact Linus himself.

I think that was the only lca Linus missed for a few years either side.