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10 Years of Git: An Interview With Linus Torvalds

Posted by samzenpus on from the straight-from-the-horses-mouth dept.

LibbyMC writes Git will celebrate its 10-year anniversary tomorrow. To celebrate this milestone, Linus shares the behind-the-scenes story of Git and tells us what he thinks of the project and its impact on software development. From the article: "Ten years ago this week, the Linux kernel community faced a daunting challenge: They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Software Configuration Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git. Today Git is used for thousands of projects and has ushered in a new level of social coding among programmers."

6 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. And yet, no one understands Git. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I hear from so many people who love git, and also from so many people who see it as needlessly complicated to the point of getting in the way of getting things done. If that latter view didn't have any truth to it, this page wouldn't exist:

    http://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/

    So, which is it? A useful tool, or simply a way for the the brightest technology people to feel smarter than everyone?

    1. Re:And yet, no one understands Git. by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

      It isn't complicated. Check out Git - The Simple Guide.

  2. Let's not forget Mercurial by Digana · · Score: 3, Informative

    Let's not forget the other contender for replacing Bitkeeper: Mercurial. We will also be celebrating its 10th year anniversary next week during the Pycon sprints.

  3. Re:The real story by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Also, Git is and was an improvement over BitKeeper from a purely technical standpoint. Merging was easier, particularly with file renames. And Git was more performant. Here's a contemporaneous comparison from 2005, only one month after Git was publicly released:

    http://www.selenic.com/pipermail/mercurial/2005-May/000334.html

    BitKeeper sucked compared to both Git and Mercurial at the time. BitKeeper was definitely an improvement when it came out, but it was quickly surpassed by the open source alternatives.

  4. Re:The real story by gmack · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's worse than that. Linus would tell everyone not to worry and go on about how Bitkeeper was a great improvement and Larry would prove him wrong by throwing public tantrums and generally playing stupid licensing games. Ex banning IBM from using the free version since they had a competing SCM being built by another (far removed) department. Banning anyone who worked directly on a competing SCM from using Bitkeeper at all. And responding to said developer reverse engineering one of the export interfaces by discontinuing the free version of Bitkeeper.

    The best part of it all was that Linus helped him design the thing in the first place.

  5. Re:BitKeeper was fine - Slashdot summary wrong aga by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Note that they guaranteed BitKeeper would always be free for Kernel developers. So as usual the Slashdot summary is wrong. They could in fact continue to use BitKeeper just fine.

    That's not correct. McVoy pulled the free-licensed version of BitKeeper (which Linus and OSDL were using) because of Tridge's work on a compatible client, and refused to sell a BK license to OSDL because they had allegedly broken the terms of the free license. This despite the fact that Tridge was an OSDL contractor, not an employee, was working on an unrelated project, and never used the BK client itself to do his work.

    Effectively, Linus and a bunch of other kernel devs would have had to quit OSDL (possibly forking Linux) to keep using BK.