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Comment by Blikkentrekker | Hacker News Reader

> And it's amazing that two of the biggest contributions to the world of software came from the same person.

That's not that amazing at all, because the fame and weight of being the creator of the former led to the adoption of the other as it became the official version control management system on which Linux was developed. — These are not two independent results.

If someone completely unknown developed Git 0.01 in 10 days, it would probably have stayed relatively obscure, and the reason for it's quality is because it became so famous due to being tied with Linux, attracting many developers.

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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.

And many things that exceed existing standards objectively somehow lost out to exceeding standards or inferior standards coming later. The success of software in particular is about being at the right place at the right time as well as interoperability. Plan9 is generally considered a technical improvement over Unix, but where is it, who uses it? Redox can improve or Unix all it wants on a theoretical level, but it will probably never outcompete it due to interoperability and because of that it won't attract the developers to add the necessary features to compete with it.

Linux in particular started because a student made a task scheduler on his home computer with no real goal to make a Unixlike kernel, and it grew into it and it so happened that at the time there was a big vacuum for a free Unixlike kernel. kFreeBSD and kMinix were not yet free at that time, had they been, Linux would have no doubt stayed a hobby project.

> not that amazing at all

Are there any other examples that come even close?

FFMPEG & QEMU from Bellard, perhaps?

Would love to learn more about this - were they created in a similarly expedited timeline? What did that look like?

I'm fairly certain a lot of very influential software came from the hands of Bill Gates as well such as the FAT filesystem which is still used, the original MSDOS and BASIC Interpreter which made a huge impact.

Of course, that's all mostly because much of that was bundled with the original MSDOS.

Also, in terms of video games, a great deal of innovative techniques and games game from John D. Carmac, which of course also is a result from Id Software pushing it.

It's hard to imagine either Linux or Git if Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie hadn't laid the foundation.

I don't think anyone builds in a vacuum these days... Everyone builds everything standing on the shoulders of giants.

Brian Kernighan

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