tl;dr: Sign your Git commits cryptographically with PGP if you don't want the history to be editable. Git's ability to edit the history is a very useful tool.

tl;dr: Sign your Git commits cryptographically with PGP if you don't want the history to be editable. Git's ability to edit the history is a very useful tool. I don't think Subversion or any other VCS prevents you from editing the history either. Maybe they just don't provide tools for that so you'd have to hack the internal data structures of the VCS or something, but you actually want a tool to modify the history. Think about the situation where somebody accidentally pushed a secret private key or a database password to a public repository, you want it out of there! (there's a ton of examples of this in GitHub. git filter-branch is what you should do). In order to provide "safe" history for Git, the commits must be cryptographically signed by their authors. This is vastly superior compared to trying to use some server side authentication kludge, which can be broken into. And the data structures of the VCS database can be modified, with a hex editor if all else fails. Cryptographic signing provides a guarantee against hex editor hacking too. If I read one more "Git sucks because you can edit ancient history" comment from someone who doesn't understand the concept of crypto signing, I will cry.