More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot more in common than with BitKeeper... and the same is true of Matt Mackall/Mercur

More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot more in common than with BitKeeper... and the same is true of Matt Mackall/Mercurial of course. The incremental improvements in git/Mercurial were of course significant in getting wide adoption.