Release of Git

Git is a distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds for the development of the Linux kernel. He began it after the proprietary tool BitKeeper, which the kernel developers had been using under a free license, was withdrawn from that use, and he wrote the first version in a matter of days. Its goals were speed, a simple design, strong support for non-linear development with thousands of parallel branches, and a full copy of the history on every developer's machine. Junio Hamano has maintained it since the early years. Torvalds said he named it after a British slang word for an unpleasant person. Hosting services such as GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket helped make Git the dominant version control tool in software development.

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