The birth of Git

As many people know, Linus created an open-source Linux in 1991. Since then, the Linux system has continued to develop and has become the largest server system software.

Although Linux was created by Linus, the growth of Linux relies on enthusiastic volunteers from around the world. How can we manage Linux code when so many people write code for Linux around the world?

The fact is that before 2002, volunteers from all over the world sent the source code file to linus via diff, and then the Linus manually merged the code!

You may wonder why Linus does not put the Linux code in the version control system? Are there free version control systems such as CVS and SVN? Because Linus is firmly opposed to CVS and Svn, these centralized version control systems are not only slow, but must be connected to the Internet for use. There are some commercial version control systems, although better than CVs and Svn, but it is paid, and the Open Source spirit of Linux is not consistent.

However, by 2002, the Linux system has been developing for ten years. The large code library makes it difficult for Linus to continue to manage it manually. The Community's brethren also expressed strong dissatisfaction with this method, therefore, Linus chose a commercial version control system, bitkeeper. bitmover, the east of bitkeeper, authorized the Linux community to use the version control system for free in a humanitarian spirit.

The good situation of stability and unity was broken in 2005, because the Linux community has been a gathering of cool people, and may not help but be infected with the habits of the rivers and lakes of the good guys in Liangshan. Andrew, who developed samba, tried to crack the bitkeeper protocol (not just him) and was discovered by bitmover (monitoring is doing well !), As a result, bitmover was furious and needed to receive free access to the Linux community.

Linus can make an apology to bitmover to ensure that we will strictly discipline our brethren in the future. Well, this is impossible. The actual situation is as follows:

Linus spent two weeks writing a distributed version control system in C. This is git! Within a month, the source code of the Linux system has been managed by git! How is Niu defined? You can try it out.

Git quickly became the most popular distributed version control system. Especially in 2008, the GitHub website was launched, providing git storage for open-source projects for free, and numerous open-source projects began to be migrated to GitHub, including jquery, PHP, Ruby, and so on.

This is just an accident in history. If bitmover did not threaten the Linux community in the past, we may not have free and super easy-to-use git now.

The birth of Git