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Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Lin
by sovande 18y ago
Performance was the thing that pushed Linus to start the project in the first place
No, problems with the bitkeeper license was the reason git was started. Linus was very happy with bitkeeper as the VCS for Linux until some kernel contributor tried to reverse engineer parts of bitkeeper which caused the bitkeeper author to threaten to revoke the free license. Git is basically a rewrite of bitkeeper
- pmjordan 18y agoSorry, maybe my comment wasn't quite clear enough. BitKeeper license problems caused him to look for another VCS. However, before he started git, he tried a bunch of other DVCS systems, including open source ones, and decided he couldn't work with them because they were simply too slow. Hence git. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software)#Early_history From the quote there it's clear that it's not a BK rewrite. git is apparently faster than BK.
- kragen 18y agoYour post contains several errors and points that I feel need clarifying. The person in question was Andrew Tridgell, the "reverse engineering" consisted of typing "help" and then observing that the "clone" command would cause BitKeeper to send the entire contents of the repository (see http://lwn.net/Articles/132938/ http://lwn.net/Articles/132938/), permitting the extraction of a complete kernel history; and BitMover did not merely threaten to revoke the free license; they actually did. Finally, Git's data model and internal structure has basically nothing in common with BitKeeper's.