Many programmers are young enough that they never knew a world without Git and the developer sites built around it, like GitHub and GitLab. You should be glad, very glad, that Linus Torvalds felt forced to create a better version control system (VCS).

Before that, I used first-generation Source Control Management (SCM) systems such as Revision Control System (RCS), which was... painful. Then along came the Concurrent Versions System (CVS) in 1986, and then Subversion (SVN) in 2000. That same year saw BitKeeper, the once open-source VCS that was Linux's first SCM.

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Before that, Torvalds had been content to keep Linux's code straight by hand. But, by 1999, as developer Larry McVoy observed, Torvalds was on the verge of burning out. The problem? You couldn't scale Torvalds. He needed the right tools to share the load. McVoy thought the answer was his own SCM program, BitKeeper. Torvalds wasn't so sure. He wanted to keep doing it the way he'd always done it.

The BitKeeper dilemma

Fast forward to 2003, and it was another story. The Linux 2.4 kernel had been late, very late, in shipping, and the 2.6 release was going even slower. So, Torvalds finally moved to BitKeeper.

At first, it worked great, but the fly in the ointment was always that BitKeeper was a proprietary program. True, there was a free version of BitKeeper that could only be used with open-source projects, but it came with significant problems.

As Linux kernel developer and editor of the Linux Weekly News (LWN), Jonathan Corbet observed at the time, "Larry wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He truly wanted to support the development of free software -- as long as that software didn't threaten his own particular business niche. ... Whenever BitMover [McVoy's company] felt that its business model was threatened," it changed its licensing terms " to the point that the BitKeeper license became known in some circles as the 'don't piss off Larry license.'"

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As Bryan Cantrill, a well-known developer, and Oxide Computer CTO, commented years later on Ycombinator, "The grand irony is that Larry was one of the earliest advocates of open sourcing the operating system at Sun ... So on the one hand, you can view the story of BitKeeper with respect to open source as almost Greek in its tragic scope."

In 2005, Andrew Tridgell, a Linux kernel developer, attempted to reverse-engineer BitKeeper's protocols to create an open-source BitKeeper client. That was what broke the camel's back for McVoy, who subsequently pulled BitKeeper's free version.

Torvalds didn't feel, however, that it was fair to blame McVoy for the break. In a Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKM) post, he wrote, "Don't blame BitMover, even if that's probably going to be a very common reaction. Larry, in particular, really did try to make things work out, but it got to the point where I decided that I don't want to be in the position of trying to hold two pieces together that would need as much glue as it seemed to require."

Regardless of who gets the blame, Linux was left without an SCM. What to do?

The creation of Git

Torvalds's answer was to create a true open-source VCS alternative: Git. In a mere 10 days, he developed a working version of Git, which was first committed on April 7, 2005.

Of course, he'd been thinking about it for a while. The BitKeeper conflict had been brewing almost since the start. In a recent GitHub interview, Torvalds said he had been facing the question, "How do I do something that works even better than BitKeeper does but doesn't do it the way BitKeeper does it?"

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As Torvalds told me then, he didn't want to change software configuration management tools; however, he had no choice but to abandon BitKeeper and create his own system. "The name itself really doesn't have a meaning. Torvalds joked that it could be a "random three-letter combination that is pronounceable and not actually used by any common Unix command. The fact that it is a mispronunciation of get may or may not be relevant." Or "stupid. contemptible and despicable. Simple. Take your pick from the dictionary of slang." Or, "global information tracker: [if] you're in a good mood, and it actually works for you. Angels sing, and a light suddenly fills the room."

Angels or not, Torvalds wasn't sure at the time that Git would be the permanent replacement. "It's a young project, and it just takes time for things to mature. That will go on for years, assuming none of the other open-source SCMs just eventually show themselves to be capable enough that we just end up deciding that Git was a good temporary bridge."

Lasting impact

I think we can all agree that Git has proven itself to be more than a temporary bridge. By the latest 6sense count, Git has over an 87% SCM market share.

Now, everyone thinks that what Git does is obvious. It wasn't at the time. Torvalds said, "The fact that you say it's obvious now, I think it wasn't obvious at the time. I think one of the reasons people found Git to be very hard to use was that most people who started without using Git were coming from a background of something CVS-like. And the Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person's standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo." Today, his vision of how to manage software code has become the way we almost all work with code.

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Amusingly enough, Torvalds told me in 2019 that while he's proud of having created Linux, what makes him "happy about Git is not that it's taken over the world. It's that we all have self-doubt, right? We all think, 'Are we actually any good?' And one of the self-doubts I had with Linux was it was just a reimplementation of Unix, right? Can I give you something that isn't just a better version of something else? Git proved to me that I can. Having two projects that made a big splash means that I'm not a one-trick pony."

Today, almost all open-source development uses Git. While Linux is tied to Git at the hip, all operating systems now support it.

Why has Git been so successful? 

Git's decentralized design was revolutionary back then. It enabled developers to work independently and synchronize changes efficiently. This approach transformed how software teams collaborate and develop projects. "Git has become virtually synonymous with version control," said Scott Chacon, GitHub founder, who credits Git with changing the course of his life.

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In addition, as Mohamed Yasser, the well-regarded software architect, wrote on LinkedIn, "Git isn't just a version control system; it's a framework of trust. A record of vision. A space where every branch reflects thought, and every commit carries intent."

As Git enters its third decade, it continues to shape the future of software development. Even if you've never written a line of code in your life, you've used work that's been controlled in the Git programming grist mill.

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