Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and Git, talks about version controlling the Linux kernel. He harps about the benefits of fully distributed version control with Git in particular. Torvalds has written Git himself after he received a fair bit of criticism for using the commercial BitKeeper (The Horror! 😉 ) to manage the Linux Kernel project for some time. At this moment there are very few version control systems that can operate fully distributed: CVS and SVN are specifically NOT suited for this task.

Torvalds shares his very strong negative opinion about these version control systems. In his opinion people who use non-distributed version control systems like CVS and SVN are “ugly and stupid” and “have a serious brain injury.” Thanks Linus! Classy 😄 .

he funny thing about this talk is that it is held at Google: a big business that uses a central version control system: Perforce. To my personal opinion Torvalds does not convey the message very well on why businesses need to use a fully distributed version control system at this time. The tool support is not up to par and businesses tend to be centrally organised anyway. When you run an Open Source project on the other hand: a fully distributed version control makes 100% sense. Business software in this day and age is still different, unfortunately. Here you can see Torvalds rant. Enjoy!

Update 2015-01: with the time passing we can identify one CLEAR winner. Git is now the de-facto standard version control system