Oh, good catch. It's a very vague allusion to git, though. The one I linked was the first one where I could find the string "git" in it.

> The whole story of how git was cockled together to ameliorate the awkwardness of dealing with BitKeeper licensing (right?) issues, and marched from there to greatness is a pretty inspiring one, to my mind.

Let's not over-romanticise the subject. Github obviously had a lot to do with it, along with luck and admiration for Linus. Also, git is hardly alone: Mercurial was almost the same idea in the beginning. Let us not forget how early git only had branching by cloning, like the Bitkeeper that both git and hg were emulating.

Also, it wasn't just that bitkeeper had an awkward license. It's that Tridgell reverse-engineered the Bitkeeper protocol, and thus Larry McVoy took away Linux's permissions to use Bitkeeper.