At the time Linus was the sole author/contributor of git, and he needed a replacement for BitKeeper in a hurry. BitKeeper had been made unavailable for Linux kernel development because the proprietor of BitKeeper was really unhappy that Tridge had reverse engineered the protocol and created an open-source client[1] which could talk to the Bitkeeper server. Linus created the first version of git sufficient to do a kernel commit in ten days[2].

[1] https://sourceforge.net/projects/sourcepuller/

[2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/10-years-of-git-an-inte...

(As Tridge tells the story[3], he telnet'ed to the bk port and typed "help" so it wasn't that much of a reverse engineering effort. :-)

[3] https://lwn.net/Articles/132938/

And really, like other famous software that people love to heap shade w.r.t how awful it is focusing only on it's warts instead of the immense productivity realized as a result, git really does have some nice parts and it was the best option for a while. The fundamental concepts of git is really not that hard to understand -- it's fundamental architectural model is event sourcing, and it's fundamental data structure is a DAG. Those are pretty good choices.

I personally have stuck to kind of basic git usages (call it "Git: The Good Parts" if you will), and have never had the problems people claim to have with git. It just has always worked, and it has always been there for me.

I thought Linus Torvalds was almost wholly responsible for the initial development of git? Even so, everything, especially software, is easier in hindsight....

Using BitKeeper as the SCM for the Linux kernel always seemed like a bad idea and when issues between the company and the community peaked git was created.

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Getting-Started-A-Short-Histo...

s/they/he/. It was Linus himself who alone created git, within a few weeks (two or three). At first it was just a handful of shell scripts, but it was self-hosting pretty early on.