Linus Torvalds wanted a distributed system that he could use like BitKeeper, but none of the available free systems met his needs. The same incident also spurred the creation of another version-control system, Mercurial. The copyright holder of BitKeeper, Larry McVoy, had withdrawn free use of the product after claiming that Andrew Tridgell had created SourcePuller by reverse engineering the BitKeeper protocols. Git development began in April 2005, after many developers of the Linux kernel gave up access to BitKeeper, a proprietary source-control management (SCM) system that they had been using to maintain the project since 2002. Git is free and open-source software distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license. As with most other distributed version control systems, and unlike most client–server systems, every Git directory on every computer is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full version-tracking abilities, independent of network access or a central server.

Since 2005, Junio Hamano has been the core maintainer. Git was originally authored by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for development of the Linux kernel, with other kernel developers contributing to its initial development. Its goals include speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows (thousands of parallel branches running on different systems). Git ( / ɡ ɪ t/) is a distributed version control system that tracks changes in any set of computer files, usually used for coordinating work among programmers collaboratively developing source code during software development. POSIX ( Linux, macOS, Solaris, AIX), Windows

Primarily in C, with GUI and programming scripts written in Shell script, Perl, Tcl and Python

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