It started out that way, but as I said, Git is now by far the leading DVCS, and AFAIK, the Linux community was the first to do DVCS on a grand scale. Furthermore, Git is surely a tremendous improvement over BitKeeper.

That's innovation in software development process.

Why do you think it's a tremendous improvement over BitKeeper? Have you used it?

I suspect s/he thinks Git is better because it is open source.

I've used both a lot and Git is faster at some things but BitKeeper gets some things right that Git does not, such as renames, per file comments, digging around in the history.

I think the right answer is that we're all better off because of both. BitKeeper was the original DSCM and paved the way, Git is open source, they are both actively moving forward, hard not to like that.

Nah, I think it's the git that Torvalds wrote when he decided that Monotone had some pretty cool ideas (the whole distributed VCS thing) but was slow and written in icky C++.

Both statements are true- it was a hack to replace BitKeeper after the Tridgell disaster, and it was inspired by monotone, which he deemed irreparably slow.

Yeah. He caught monotone at a bad time. Graydon had just gone on sabbatical...

Also, 'disaster' is a bit...harsh. As I heard, he just telnet'd and asked for "help".

Well... it was a disaster in the sense that it caused a row and meant they had to switch versioning systems.