Torvalds said in 2007 that he could not remember “exactly when I started git development” but that he probably started at or around April 3rd 2005, that the project was self-hosting from April 7th – the first commit of Git is 1244 lines of commented code and described as “the information manager from hell” – and that the first commit of the Linux kernel was on April 16th. //

Git did what he needed within the first year, said Torvalds, “and when it did what I needed, I lost interest.”

Torvalds described himself as a casual user of Git who mainly uses just five commands: git merge, git blame, git log, git commit and git pull – though he adds later in the interview that he also uses git status “fairly regularly.”

Why did Git succeed? Scott Chacon, co-founder of GitHub and now at startup company GitButler, said that it filled a gap at the time when open source was evolving. SVN, which actually has an easier mental model, is centralized. There was no easy way in 2005 for an open source contributor to submit proposed changes to a code base. Git made it simple to fork the code, make a change, and then send a request to the maintainers that they pull the changed code from the fork to the main branch. Git has a command called request-pull which formats an email for sending to a mailing list with the request included, and this is the origin of the term pull request.