Torvalds Creates New Linux Development System

Just in case you missed this news the other day, Linus is working on a new dev management tool called Git. After the controversy over his previous choice in this area, I think that making his own solution was the best way to go.

Linux founder Linus Torvalds has reluctantly created his own software configuration management system, Git, to oversee Linux kernel development.

Previously, Torvalds had been using BitMover Inc.’s BitKeeper SCM (software configuration management) to manage Linux. “I’m pretty well known for not being a huge fan of source control that gets in the way and makes it harder to merge with all the people I work with all the time,” Torvalds said in a statement last year.

“BitKeeper is different. It’s made me more than twice as productive, and its fundamentally distributed nature allows me to work the way I prefer to work—with many different groups working independently, yet allowing for easy merging between them.”

Not everyone in the free software/open-source community was as happy as Torvalds about BitKeeper because it is a proprietary program. Flame wars quickly erupted over the use of the proprietary program to manage the creation of the open-source software poster-child project: Linux. [Read the rest]