- An offensive word meaning unpleasant, silly, incompetent, annoying, senile, elderly or childish person.
- Surprisingly, it is also a personal pronoun in Old English 😁 (though spelled ġit)
Linus named git after himself! No, really!
I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First ‘Linux’, now ‘Git’
Before git, Linux developers used a proprietary VCS called BitKeeper, because according to Linus, no existing libre VCS was sufficient. Linux developers had a gratis license to use BitKeeper for the purposes of developing Linux. In 2005, absolute legend Andrew Tridgell, who was not a Linux developer and thus not a party to the license, “reverse-engineered BitKeeper” simply by telnetting into the server and typing “help.” In retaliation, BitKeeper CEO Larry McVoy revoked the Linux developers’ gratis license to use BitKeeper. Bizarrely, Torvalds blamed Tridgell for this - not himself for choosing to use this proprietary application, nor McVoy for revoking his gratis license to it.
Without the gratis BitKeeper license, Torvalds was forced to find or develop a libre alternative. Given the events that led up to the creation of git, I would say it is named appropriately.
Legendary. Good ol’ days 😁.