For people who don&#x27;t know the history -- McVoy offered free bitkeeper licenses to various open source projects, and the Linux kernel switched to it.<p>After Andrew Tridgell (SAMBA, among other projects) reverse-engineered the bitkeeper protocol [1] in order to create his own client, the license was rescinded for everyone.<p>As a result, Linus wrote git.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;132938&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;132938&#x2F;</a>