Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people that

Github may have been part of the reason, but the support of Linus/kernel devs plus the very active mailing list probably had a lot to do too. I knew people that were git fanatics prior to github. Git was also the vcs of choice for Ruby / Rails developers.