2005: The Git Age Begins
One characteristic that set Linux and other open source projects born in the 1990s apart from GNU was that they were collaboratively developed by large, relatively decentralized groups of programmers. (The GNU development strategy initially centered on small teams of programmers working in relative isolation.) Those coders originally collaborated via email, then moved onto source code management (SCM) systems. In the case of Linux, developers relied on a proprietary SCM system called BitKeeper until 2005, when the owners of the platform stopped allowing free use of the product. In response, Torvalds wrote Git as an open source replacement.
Starting in 2008, when Git repositories became available through Web services like GitHub, Git helped drive a revolution in the way open source code was managed by making the development process more scalable than ever, and allowing nearly everyone to contribute. In other words, Git brought the openness of open source coding to a new level, making it possible for anyone to launch an open source project quickly and accept contributions seamlessly through the Web.
One characteristic that set Linux and other open source projects born in the 1990s apart from GNU was that they were collaboratively developed by large, relatively decentralized groups of programmers. (The GNU development strategy initially centered on small teams of programmers working in relative isolation.) Those coders originally collaborated via email, then moved onto source code management (SCM) systems. In the case of Linux, developers relied on a proprietary SCM system called BitKeeper until 2005, when the owners of the platform stopped allowing free use of the product. In response, Torvalds wrote Git as an open source replacement.
Starting in 2008, when Git repositories became available through Web services like GitHub, Git helped drive a revolution in the way open source code was managed by making the development process more scalable than ever, and allowing nearly everyone to contribute. In other words, Git brought the openness of open source coding to a new level, making it possible for anyone to launch an open source project quickly and accept contributions seamlessly through the Web.
