Working with your files locally is all well and good, but as soon as you start collaborating with other contributors doing the same it becomes difficult. In the early days of the Linux Kernel, patches were sent over Usenet and email, reviewed by Linus Torvalds, merged with the current kernel and all uploaded to an FTP site. Maintaining a consistent codebase this way is cumbersome, especially as contributions went meteoric in the mid-90s. The solution was to use a proprietary version control system (VCS) called BitKeeper. Code was now stored centrally and enabled developers to fork and branch the code with impunity, queue up their patchsets and generally not have to worry about singing from different source hymnsheets.
For a time that worked well, but all good things must come to an end. The parable of Linux and divorce is an interesting one (it’s got mischievous reverse engineering, corporate
