The kernel's code of conduct, one week later

Well, I don't want to write a book about it right here and now. Most interested observers know that Linus got the idea of content hashing and other important ideas from Monotone:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2005/4/6/121

The main problem with Monotone was performance. Linus knew what to do about that. Monotone was the brainchild of Graydon Hoare. Incidentally, so is Rust. Quite the prolific, largely unsung inventor.

I knew Graydon from my time at Red Hat, where we both worked for Red Hat and met from time to time in the Toronto offices of the former Cygnus. Around that time, I was also casting around for a good design model for a distributed revision control system, as an alternative to Bitkeeper. I found Monotone, some months before the drama unfolded resulting in Linus's post above. Then, Monotone had no concept of directories, it only had a flat forest of objects with each content-hashed object indexed under the full path name.

One day in some dim hallway, possibly at Red Hat headquarters during a conference, I buttonholed Graydon and launched into a polemic about what I thought needed to be done to Monotone to make it truly useful. That was basically, elaborate the metadata design so that directories are objects too. Graydon initially found the idea offensive compared to what he perceived as his simpler and purer approach, but the next time I saw him, he informed me that he had in fact changed Monotone's metadata design along those lines, and Monotone's manifest was born. This is essentially what Linus found when he discovered Monotone a short time later.

Forgive me if I have erred slightly in some details, that was thirteen years ago. Graydon would probably be able to help me with this. Until now, he and I were the only two who knew this detail.

The story of how Git came to be is a whole lot more complicated than that. The real hero of the story is Andrew Tridgell, who set his brilliant mind to work on creating an open source Bitkeeper client. Though he did not intend it, a fact I can attest to from first hand knowledge, this work set in motion the chain of events that culminated in the author of Bitkeeper himself forcing Linus to do the right thing, and stop forcing the Linux kernel community to depend on a proprietary tool. Everybody knows the rest of the story, but these early events remain shrouded as a bit of a mystery.

For his efforts, Andrew (Tridge as we know him) was hounded out of the Linux kernel community in a most unseemly way. Linus should put that on his list of unfinished business that he needs to apologize for.