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Oh, good catch. It's a very vague allusion to git, though. The one I linked was the first one where I could find the string "git" in it. > The whole story of h
by jordigh 12y ago
Oh, good catch. It's a very vague allusion to git, though. The one I linked was the first one where I could find the string "git" in it.
> The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind.
Let's not over-romanticise the subject. Github obviously had a lot to do with it, along with luck and admiration for Linus. Also, git is hardly alone: Mercurial was almost the same idea in the beginning. Let us not forget how early git only had branching by cloning, like the Bitkeeper that both git and hg were emulating.
Also, it wasn't just that bitkeeper had an awkward license. It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, and thus Larry McVoy took away Linux's permissions to use Bitkeeper.
- kinghajj 12y ago> It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol I always thought it was weird how telnetting into a port and typing "help" was considered "reverse engineering".
- jordigh 12y agoHm, it was more than that. It involved inspecting network packets. What I found weird is how Linus blamed Tridgell for the reverse engineering: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tridgell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tri...
- grover_hartmann 12y agoI also find that weird. Could someone elaborate more on this?
- ttctciyf 12y ago> Let's not over-romanticise the subject. It was an era of romance and derring do! :) I'm not sure about github - I take your point, but you might also argue that if git didn't have the particular design, features, and mindset that went into creating it, github couldn't possibly have become the thing it is today. Without getting into BK morality tales, though, it is one of those great stories along the lines "well in that case I'll jolly well write it myself" which shows that just sometimes doing that can (in some small way) change everything. Not unlike the linux kernel itself, or GNU/emacs, of course.