The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2005–2008
Linus Torvalds built Git so a huge project could branch without one central server.
After BitKeeper revoked its free licence, Torvalds made a distributed, open-source version-control tool for the Linux kernel.
Linux · Git
the move
The Linux kernel had grown large and relied on a proprietary distributed version-control tool, BitKeeper, whose free status was tied to a commercial company.
In 2002 the kernel project adopted BitKeeper, but in 2005 the relationship broke down and the tool's free availability was revoked, which pushed the community to build its own.
Linus Torvalds wrote Git to be fully distributed, handle a project the size of the kernel efficiently, and support the parallel workflows a huge open-source community needs, and it was released that same year.
why it works
- A full local copy lets a developer work without network access or a server's permission
- Branches are cheap and local, so parallel work does not collide
- Distributed history means no single point of failure or of control
- Speed and compactness let it scale to a project the size of the Linux kernel
what transfers
If coordination costs are the bottleneck, distribute the thing being coordinated: give everyone the whole history and let merging, not permission, be the gate.
what came after
Git became the dominant version-control system, hosted on platforms like GitHub and GitLab, and transformed open-source collaboration and software engineering. Its design, built to solve a specific kernel problem, became the default for software development worldwide.
references
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