bitkeeper

It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, and thus Larry McVoy took away Linux's permissions to use Bitkeeper.

I think Monotone was an alternative to BitKeeper and BitKeeper was the inspiration of Git and Mercurial.

So to be like git, bitkeeper would have had to really give up central ownership and control.

He wrote git because of the bitkeeper incidence and then handed over the maintainership very shortly after.

Git’s initial design was very bitkeeper-like too, such as branching-by-cloning being the only way to branch.

Let us not forget how early git only had branching by cloning, like the Bitkeeper that both git and hg were emulating.

BitKeeper went on to serve in the early development of the Linux kernel.

When the publishers of BitKeeper decided in 2005 to restrict the program's licensing,[5] free alternatives Bazaar, Git, and Mercurial followed not long after.

Especially for small companies like yours that create complex software like BitKeeper.

BitKeeper has had a better version of this since around 2007.

I wonder if BitKeeper owner Larry McVoy has ever regretted not open sourcing his software?

Imagine the linux kernel development process pre-bitkeeper, mailing lists and patches.

I believe Linus has said that "git" was referring to himself rather than the guy who reverse engineered BitKeeper, but I don't believe him.

I'm assuming you meant to say the "Linux/BitKeeper" mess.

Even in the US, "git" means "idiot." It was my understanding Linus called Git for the same reason Mercurial is called Mercurial: as an unflattering reference to Larry McVoy, who was involved in the Linux/Bitkeeper mess.

> 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".

It started being welcoming to CVS and SVN users, and its CLI mimicked those, as well, as a few ideas of Bitkeeper.

I haven't found yet when it originally appeared, but it was probably the pre-Bitkeeper days; I found a discussion about it dated from the last century.