BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)
ThisGraphite blog post retells the history of the BitKeeper fiasco and thedawn of the Git era.
When we think of history, we often romanticize it as being born ofa sudden stroke of inspiration. But the creation of git shows thefar harsher reality of invention: a slowly escalating disagreementover a license; the need for a scrappy backup solution to unblockwork; and then continued polishing and iteration through years andyears, led not by the inventor, but rather a community.
For those who weren't around in those days, a perusal of the LWN coveragefrom the time might be of interest too, including:
- Our first mention of BitKeeper in October 1998
- Not quite open source, 1999
- Linus tries out BitKeeper, 2002
- The free software community and proprietary packages, 2002
- The kernel and BitKeeper part ways, 2005
- How Tridge reverse engineered BitKeeper, 2005
- The guts of Git, 2005
...and a lot more for those who care to search for it.