&gt; What I don&#x27;t understand is why they had to purge the commit history.<p>When the team I&#x27;m on open sourced an upgrade framework[1] of ours we did the same. There&#x27;s hundreds of commits over the course of years where the only intended audience was internal, some of those may contain information that wouldn&#x27;t be appropriate for external consumption (e.g. a reference to non-public information) and others (well most of them really) contain information that would be useless externally (e.g. links to builds or reviews that are accessible only internally, bug numbers, etc).<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vmware&#x2F;upgrade-framework" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;vmware&#x2F;upgrade-framework</a>