Linus Torvalds wrote Git in April 2005, after the Linux kernel project lost its free licence for the proprietary BitKeeper system. He wanted something fast and distributed that could protect against corruption. Within months he handed maintenance to Junio C Hamano, who still leads the project.
Git’s cheap branching and offline work, together with hosting services such as GitHub (2008) and GitLab, made it the default version control system for open-source and commercial software alike. A new feature release ships about every twelve weeks. Recent work has included the move to SHA-256 object IDs and better performance on very large repositories.