[phire]

I do think an open source, distributed, content addressable VCS was inevitable. Not git itself, but something with similar features/workflows.

Nobody was really happy with the VCS situation in 2005. Most people were still using CVS, or something commercial. SVN did exist, it had only just reached version 1.0 in 2004, but your platforms like SourceForge still only offered CVS hosting. SVN was considered to be a more refined CVS, but it wasn't that much better and still shared all the same fundamental flaws from its centralised nature.

On the other hand, "distributed" was a hot new buzzword in 2005. The recent success of Bittorrent (especially its hot new DHT feature) and other file sharing platforms had pushed the concept mainstream.

Even if it wasn't for the Bitkeeper incident, I do think we would have seen something pop up by 2008 at the latest. It might not have caught on as fast as git did, but you must remember the thing that shot git to popularity was GitHub, not the linux kernel.

[bloopernova]

Yeah I think people that complain about git should try running a project with CVS or subversion.

The amazing flexibility of git appears to intimidate a lot of people, and many coders don't seem to build up a good mental model of what is going on. I've run a couple of git tutorials for dev teams, and the main feedback I get is "I had no idea git was so straightforward".