Seonglae ChoBefore Git, patch-based diffs and tarballs were the main form of version control.
Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton developed Quilt to manage patches.
In the 21st century, contributors’ dissatisfaction grew, and Linus Torvalds looked for an alternative. He adopted BitKeeper, a proprietary tool that had relatively good features at the time. Linux used it for three years, but because it was not open source, contributor dissatisfaction remained. Andrew Tridgell, developer of Samba and rsync, reverse engineered BitKeeper and attempted to build an open-source version. When this became known, Linux withdrew from using BitKeeper. In April 2005, Linus Torvalds began developing Git and released it in June. In July, Linus handed over maintainership and project stewardship to Junio Hamano.
