Why did you create Git?
Torvalds: I really never wanted to do source control management at all and felt that it was just about the least interesting thing in the computing world (with the possible exception of databases ;^), and I hated all SCM’s with a passion. But then BitKeeper came along and really changed the way I viewed source control. BK got most things right and having a local copy of the repository and distributed merging was a big deal. The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM’s go away – the politics around “who can make changes.” BK showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository. But BK had its own problems, too; there were a few technical choices that caused problems (renames were painful), but the biggest downside was the fact that since it wasn’t open source, there was a lot of people who didn’t want to use it. So while we ended up having several core maintainers use BK – it was free to use for open source projects – it never got ubiquitous. So it helped kernel development, but there were still pain points.
That then came to a head when Tridge (Andrew Tridgell) started reverse-engineering the (fairly simply) BK protocol, which was against the usage rules for BK. I spent a few weeks (months? It felt that way) trying to mediate between Tridge and Larry McVoy, but in the end it clearly wasn’t working. So at some point I decided that I can’t continue using BK, but that I really didn’t want to go back to the bad old pre-BK days. Sadly, at the time, while there were some other SCM’s that kind of tried to get the whole distributed thing, none of them did it remotely well. I had performance requirements that were not even remotely satisfied by what was available, and I also worried about integrity of the code and the whole workflow, so I ended up just deciding to write my own.