Larry McVoy was the BitKeeper guy. This was early in terms of distributed version control, but I have no idea if it was the first or just (for a while) the most popular. Linus wrote git using several lessons he learned from using BitKeeper. It's not just a copy, though.

Linus wasn't against version control. He thought that CVS and SVN (the leaders at the time) were just not beneficial enough for his use case. The kernel developers worked with "patches" as their unit of work and neither of these could handle them well. More fundamentally they were centralized and Linus had experience from watching the BSDs and knew that a centralized version control was actually worse than none. He both explicitly didn't want to have anymore authority or convenience than any other developer and at the same time wanted absolute authority over his own version. Neither of these were possible with CVS/SVN.