>"Linus Torvalds said in 2012 that one of his own biggest successes was recognizing how good a developer Hamano was on Git, and trusting him to maintain it."

I came across this email from Linus announcing the handover: https://lwn.net/Articles/145123/

It's interesting how the first ever git project itself was looking for new maintainer almost as soon as it was created.

wow! what an accolade

Seconded. I can only imagine how good Junio must be to have earned that kind of praise and trust.

Thanks, that really helps.

As an open-source advocate, my first thought was, "Why the hell is Google releasing a version of a protocol that Linus Torvalds wrote?"

Without that context, it would be like Google throwing up an announcement, "Introducing Google's Linux Kernel 5.0!"

Yeah, that was my reaction, and it made me sad that Google has so eroded my trust over the decades that I was turned off at seeing an announcement implying they are deeply involved in core open source tools. I mean, who else but companies swimming in cash can truly deeply support this stuff, and for the most part, the people working on these tools really do care about the open source community. But Google's reputation is so tarnished that my gut reaction is at odds with my rational one, and that's a sad thing to realize.

I wasn't aware that the maintainer of Git works at Google, so I was a bit surprised by the announcement too. But it wasn't because of any drama like Google eroding my trust or whatnot, just that my information was incomplete so my gut reaction was irrational.

That may seen odd, but it could happen in a open-source world: multiple parties releasing different versions of the same piece of software and calling it the same.

One fun example of this is the so-called RPM "5" fork[0], which is basically dead and almost entirely unused[1].

The result is the main RPM everyone uses will probably stay at version 4.x forever.

[0]: http://rpm5.org/

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rpm_(software)#RPM_v5

They could skip a version like PHP did. Among other reasons, since books and articles about PHP 6 had already been written long before PHP 5+1 came out, they went with 7.

Sure, they could. I don't think they've felt the need to. RPM tends to change slowly and conservatively.

Both Git and Linux are trademarked, presumably to prevent such hijinx

Linux is trademarked because of some "hijinx"...

"Initially, nobody registered it, but on August 15, 1994, [...] filed for the trademark Linux, and then demanded royalties from Linux distributors. In 1996, Torvalds and some affected organizations sued him to have the trademark assigned to Torvalds, and, in 1997, the case was settled." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Copyright,_trademark_and...

Isn't it customary to at least rename the fork?

Customary, but unless the name is trademarked, not required.

Some licences require a change of name for substantial modifications, e.g. the Artistic Licence and Apache Licence v1. But those kinds of clauses are pretty rare nowadays.

Same here. I was like, "If there are about to drop 3 versions at the same time like angular, I need to you use SVN ASAP".

Non-Mobile link for those on desktop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junio_Hamano

The mobile version of Wikipedia works perfectly fine in a browser. I personally prefer it for readability.

If you link the normal desktop version it the reader will automatically be redirected to the place they prefer.

I don't...

Fun fact: if you google “git blame” it returns his wikipedia entry.

Alright, I was wondering why this was published on the Google Opensource website. I had no idea. Yet, the Git project itself has not been published under their umbrella.

https://opensource.google.com/projects/list/featured

We currently only list project that are or were primarily developed by Google. We decided to include projects that started at Google and were since donated to foundations, such as Kubernetes.

But we aren't yet including projects where we are just heavy contributors, but they're not "Google projects". That includes Linux, git, LLVM, and a host of others. We do want to recognize them in our project directory, but want to make sure that they are distinguished from Google projects so that we're not implying something that is accurate.

One of the places it's hosted at is https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git

See the list of URLs at https://public-inbox.org/git/[email protected]...

I'm guessing that their job at Google allocates a significant percentage of their time to work generally on open source Git, with the rest on Google-specific needs and deployments like googlesource.com. This post on Google's open source blog fits squarely in the overlap of both.

As well, most of Google's releases in the developer tools, open source, or Cloud Platform worlds don't have ads - indeed GCP is an entire revenue stream not dependent on ads.

Source: Much of my day-job work on my last team at Google was open source on the GCP team, and I also got approval to own some side-project work done on my own time. So I got to see how they handle such things. I don't have specific knowledge of the Git team's arrangements, but this is an educated guess.

I guess others downvote you because your insinuation about how Google will sneak ads into an open source project. They've never done that before, so it is rather odd accusation.

They moved a bunch of open source functionality out of AOSP to force all-or-nothing adoption of their services + tracking.

Most likely it was noted because several of us probably immediately wondered why google would have taken it upon themselves to release a new version of something they weren't the maintainer of.

Google has as much incentive as anyone else to introduce a faster wire protocol. The article mentions the Chrome project, and don’t forget that Google Cloud has a git-repo-hosting product.

That's true, and while we all get to enjoy the new protocol, it seems like its primary beneficiary will be big organizations that have gigantic repos with massive numbers of refs in them. Furthermore, there's a clear orientation towards specialization -- putting that giant repo on a central server. Google clearly stands to benefit more from this work than those of us who use git as a distributed version control system. Who pays the piper calls the tune.

In all fairness, GitHub also has much to benefit from this too, playing host of the Mozilla git mirror, which also has a relatively large number of refs: https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev

My first thought was “Ugh, Google forked git and now we’ll have two competing protocols”

So its good to know why this was posted on Google’s site.

Even if he does it on Google's time, all his contributions are still licensed under GNU GPL V2 so Google cannot claim any ownership over Git.

The GPL is a license, not a Contributor Agreement or a Copyright Transfer. The author remains the owner of the copyright when they let others use it under a license, even open source licenses like the GPL.

Licensing a software out does not mean the author can no longer "claim any ownership". In the case of OSS licenses, it just means that they can't claim sole ownership.

Yes, but from the perspective of the end user (me), the license guarantees that I can use the current version of the software for free forever without Google or anyone else forcing any changes.

Plus, if I don't like any changes they make, I can fork my own copy and continue developing on that (which the community will certainly do in a heartbeat if needed).

Yes, of course. I was just trying to clarify that that guarantee is due to the software being licensed to you and not because ownership gets transferred from the author.

so right now, Google has a word to say about the direction of git.... But that's normal.

It is mentioned because this announcement is hosted on Googleblog.