How do you know they didn’t do the same or better? Linus has the advantage of a huge audience (of adoring fans, no less), there were competing dvcs’s at the time - mercurial, bazaar, darcs - and likely many more in companies and lone developer machines which weren’t successful.

If Linus had released Git quietly, but put his name behind mercurial and used it for the Linux kernel, would Git still be the de-facto standard today? Or is his popularity and influence at least as big a factor as his design or code skills?

Regardless of the success of git, it's novel branching tech was what set it apart. And he did beat entire teams of coders to that solution. Of course his name was what lent it so much credence, but a good solution tends to make waves in online communities. Best example? Bitcoin.

> Best example? Bitcoin.

Yeah but people here don't like to hear that :-)