Git is already 20 years old — On April 8, 2025, the world’s most widely used version control system celebrates its 20th anniversary.
To mark the occasion, Linus Torvalds, the iconic creator of Git and the Linux kernel, looks back on a unique story that deeply shaped modern software development.
git origin
In April 2005, after a dispute over the licensing of the now-discontinued proprietary software BitKeeper, which was used by Linux kernel developers, Linus Torvalds decided to create Git.
BitKeeper, though powerful, was not well accepted by the open source community due to its proprietary nature, despite being available for free to open projects.
A reverse engineering attempt by kernel developer Andrew Tridgell further escalated tensions, prompting Torvalds to build a more viable open source alternative.
“I’ll do something that works for me, and I won’t care about anybody else”, he explains.
In just ten days, Torvalds developed a functional enough version to be used right away for Linux kernel development. However, this speed was the result of months of prior thinking, which had begun around November or December 2004.
On April 8, 2005, Linus Torvalds made the very first commit of this new version control tool, which he named Git — a historic commit made using Git itself!
Git: misunderstood at first, essential ever since
From the start, Git was a game-changer thanks to its decentralized design — a true revolution at the time.
Two key principles drove its development: speed, essential to handle a high volume of changes efficiently, and the widespread use of a hashing system (SHA-1), not primarily for security but to detect file corruption — a problem Torvalds had already faced with BitKeeper.
Git was built with a Unix-like philosophy (“everything is a file, everything is a process”), making its core concepts simple to explain despite the complex implementation.
Though quickly adopted by kernel developers, Git didn’t win everyone over right away.
Torvalds recalls the early criticism: “Git was getting complaints for the first few months and years that it was ‘hard to use’ and ‘unintuitive’.” But over the years, a real shift took place.
By around 2008, the arrival of a new wave of developers — especially in the web community with projects like Ruby on Rails — led to widespread adoption of Git and a more favorable view of the tool.
A creator loyal to his tools
As for his personal use, Torvalds says he has stuck to his minimalist habits, still relying on just five commands: git merge, git blame, git log, git commit, and git pull.
He also continues to work exclusively from the command line, without any sophisticated editor integrations, staying loyal to MicroEMACS, his favorite editor since university. “Every time I try a modern editor, I realize my hands are too old to switch.”
Torvalds also mentions he never really used third-party tools or advanced integrations for Git, apart from gitk, a graphical visualizer integrated into the project early on.
When asked about future improvements for Git, Torvalds highlights the need for better unification of bug tracking and issue systems, which remain fragmented across platforms.
While he has some minor regrets about early decisions — such as using SHA-1, which later required significant effort to add support for SHA-256 — he’s overall satisfied with the core choices that made Git robust and efficient.
When asked about the next big project after Linux and Git, Torvalds remains humble and pragmatic: “All the projects that I’ve had to make, I had to make because I couldn’t find anything better that somebody else did.” He even admits hoping he’ll never need to start another one — which he sees as a sign that “the world has failed to solve its own problems.”
Today, he mostly emphasizes the importance of Junio Hamano’s work, who took over Git’s maintenance very early and has been a key figure in its long-term success.
The interview with Linus Torvalds was conducted by the GitHub team, who will release the full video by the end of the week. In the meantime, a shortened transcript has been shared on GitHub’s official blog.
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