In April 2005, BitKeeper — the proprietary version control system the Linux kernel had been using — revoked its free licence for open-source projects following a dispute. Linus Torvalds, unimpressed with the available alternatives, spent ten days writing his own. The design goals were: fast, distributed, and proof against data corruption. Git tracks content rather than files, stores everything as a Merkle tree of SHA-1 hashed objects, and has no central server by design. It was functional enough to manage the Linux kernel within two weeks. Within a few years it had become the dominant version control system across the industry. GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and a significant fraction of modern software development infrastructure were built on top of it. Torvalds named it “git” — British slang for an unpleasant person — saying he named all his projects after himself.
