Did you know Git was originally created in 10 days? (opens in new tab)

Well, the fact that he and the other Linux maintainers had previously used (and were intimately familiar with) BitKeeper, and thus had a good idea of what their new FLOSS DVCS should look like, probably also helped.

Not saying that he copied BitKeeper 1:1, but if you look at BitKeeper usage examples (http://www.bitkeeper.org/), they do look familiar, don't they? BTW, BitKeeper is now open source - and development seems to have largely ceased...

I certainly agree that marketing plays a huge role in software, but I was actively looking at different VCS trying even the obscure ones, there were really no reasonable non-proprietary options.

Bazaar and mercurial got created the same year as git. Before that it made you happy if people were using subversion instead of CVS.

Sure, if nobody knows about the project nobody will use it, but I think git stands on its own. If any medium project adopted it (and it seems likely that its author would be working on some other things too), I think it would spread.

Linux might have provided fertile ground for the adoption of Git but Git had to exceed existing standards to achieve its own merit-based acclaim. He created these two tools that both have achieved high degrees of utility and widespread adoption within their respective domains.

> not that amazing at all

Are there any other examples that come even close?

i don't see that many people with more than one contribution that have the caliber of linux. so to me it looks like that when the first big contribution is wildly successful, then they will stick working on that and not start other projects.

possibly one of the reasons why git could be successful is that linus quickly handed over development to someone else.

of the top of my head i can only think of a few people that created multiple wildly successful projects. donald knuth with his books and with TeX (and i am not sure if the books are considered wildly successful). richard stallman with emacs and gcc (and the GNU licenses), anders hejlsberg with turbo pascal, c# and maybe typescript.

if you look at everyone else, they usually have only one wildly successful project that they are known for.

here is a list of programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers most there only have one project that is widely known. if they have multiple projects then most of those are smaller.

Not necessarily, there are plenty of examples where earlier success did not lead to future success. A recent example that comes to mind is CloudKitchens? I could be wrong about CK, so happy to learn differently.

Yea BitKeeper was a one hell of a story. They also had a clause that holders of commercial BitKeepers licenses could not develop competing products and even forced a company to ban one of their employees from contributing to Mercurial(?) or the whole company would have their BitKeeper license revoked.

The sad part is that BitKeeper really was an amazing product and way ahead of its time, pioneering many of the features git later made popular. Had they just been a bit smarter about the whole thing they could be where git (and GitHub) is today

Ironically the last thing they did before going bankrupt was release BitKeeper as Open Source.

In a way, he got enough publicity - we still know about it, so many years later.

But he lost the opportunity to remain central to the booming FOSS ecosystem, and all that it entails.

No kidding

he has only himself to blame for that. the whole story shows the power of collaboration in the FOSS community. get in the way of that collaboration and you will get rolled over. i have seen that happen multiple times. you get to ignore the will of the community at your own peril.

Yes, it was -- which made this whole episode particularly galling and tragic.[0]

[0] http://dtrace.org/blogs/bmc/2005/04/15/on-reverse-engineerin...

I always said git is very nice and understandable after your read thru git book three or four times.

Which is to say everything in it makes intuitive sense if you know exactly how it works which is fine for developers, not exactly great for normal user that just wants to have some version control writing his novel.

But I think tooling got to the point where that is no longer the problem.

The "porcelain" (as opposed to the chrome) is terribly arcane.

I had a really tremendously bad experience with using git professionally and haven't touched it since, but apparently instead of something like "undo" you get "reflog." I don't know what to say about that. Everyone tells me that the internals are great, wonderful, magic, and I am willing to accept that on face value, but the selection of command names just baffles me. As a solo developer, I will just live without it until the names make more sense and I can find a use case.

(I am quite sure that someone will begin howling that you cannot program without git the same way projects cannot be done without Agile, and yet programming existed before either.)

Massive amounts of yak shaving. Two weeks ago I decided to build a new web app. Before I build it, I need a solid deploy strategy to save money since Heroku nuked their free tier. Currently writing a new programming language so I can reinvent Terraform with an AGPL license. I should deploy hello world by 2049.

I could almost get my front-end and back-end to talk together despite CORS.

Hacker News is completely filled with people who have gotten crappy early versions of things out in that time frame. You don't see people claiming their first versions were great.

Oh sweet - I added that link. Thank you!

This answer explains how to edit the url to get to the oldest commit in Github

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28533602/how-to-navigate...

git itself doesn't need to be hosted

Lol - thanks... this was just something I wrote quickly.

Or, I meant that this was yet _another_ heart attack waiting in line? Kidding...

queue heart attack attack would be something for future scifi movies fr

He did share. He submitted this article :)

SourceSafe was nice with its built in tools integration when everyone else at the time was non existent. It was really meant for a 2-5 person team. Anything bigger and the thing would die on its own database updates. But if you are still using that thing today you should move away from it. It is terrible for usage today. I got to the point I was doing backups every 6 hours and keeping rotating backups on hand for when it decided to corrupt itself. Then I as subjected to clearcase and sourcesafe was amazing compared to the complexity that thing brought. I knew it was bad when they had to send out a consultant just to show us how to get it installed correctly and make branches.