Linus Torvalds Creates Git in 10 Days After a Licensing Dispute
When kernel developers lost free access to the proprietary BitKeeper in April 2005, Torvalds responded by writing an entirely new version control system himself — Git's first commit landed within days.
Git, now the dominant version control system across nearly all of software development, exists because of a licensing dispute that abruptly cut Linux kernel developers off from the proprietary tool they’d been using. Linus Torvalds began writing Git on April 3, 2005, and made the very first commit to the new project on April 7, 2005.
The BitKeeper arrangement, and why it fell apart
Since 2002, kernel development had used BitKeeper, a commercial version control system from BitMover, made available free of charge to the kernel project specifically. In 2005, kernel developer Andrew Tridgell built a tool capable of communicating with BitKeeper repositories; BitMover considered this reverse-engineering of their protocol a violation of the free-use terms, and revoked the kernel project’s free license as a result.
Why existing open-source tools weren’t good enough
With BitKeeper no longer an option, Torvalds evaluated the existing open-source alternatives (CVS, Subversion) and found none of them fast enough for how kernel development actually worked — he needed a system capable of applying patches in well under three seconds each, since a typical development cycle could involve applying roughly 250 patches. Rather than accept a slower tool, he wrote a new one.
An unusually fast build-out
Development began April 3, 2005; Torvalds announced the project publicly on April 6; by April 7, Git was self-hosting — meaning its own source code was being managed with Git itself. The first merge of multiple branches happened on April 18, just eleven days after the first commit. Torvalds handed off primary maintenance to Junio Hamano on July 26, 2005, and Hamano oversaw the project through its 1.0 release on December 21, 2005.
Why the speed of this origin story still gets told
Building a genuinely new version control system, fast enough to replace a mature commercial tool for one of the most demanding open-source projects in existence, in roughly ten days from a standing start, is an unusual pace even by the standards of software history — a large part of why the Git origin story remains one of the more frequently retold anecdotes in open-source development, alongside the kernel’s own founding.
Sources: Git turns 20: A Q&A with Linus Torvalds — GitHub Blog, Git — Wikipedia, 1.2 Getting Started - A Short History of Git — git-scm.com