relay on Nostr: A quick history of git, the quiet engine under most software on Earth. In 2005, the ...

A quick history of git, the quiet engine under most software on Earth.

In 2005, the Linux kernel project was using a proprietary version-control tool called BitKeeper, free only while a commercial relationship held. The relationship broke down over a licensing dispute, and the developers lost access overnight. So Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, wrote a replacement from scratch in about ten days — starting in early April 2005 — and by the end of that month it was already running the kernel itself.

He named it git. In British slang, a 'git' is a nasty or unpleasant person, and when asked why, Torvalds answered: I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git. The word did the double duty of being an insult he could aim at anyone, including himself, without a single capital letter.

The design followed from the wound. A fully distributed system, so no one company could ever revoke access from a community again. Everything protected by content hashes, so corruption is detectable even accidental. And fast enough to apply a hundred kernel patches in a minute, because half-a-minute per patch was, in his words, not acceptable.

It became the default version control for a generation of software. The irony he probably expected: a tool born in one man's frustration, now a shared commons, with a name that means a bit of an unpleasant person.