OStatic

The up-and-coming version control system git has begun to prove its mettle outside of Linux kernel development. The Ruby on Rails community has embraced it wholeheartedly with many core projects migrating to the system recently. The climate has become right for businesses to spring up in the wake of this adoption.

Many open source projects are switching from CVS and Subversion to newer, distributed version-control systems. One of those is Git, written by none other than Linus Torvalds, originally for use on the Linux kernel. Git is becoming increasingly popular for use on other projects, as well. Why?

The Internet has, of course, been essential to the growth of the open source movement. Most communication among the developers of an open source project takes place via e-mail, IRC, or even instant messaging.

Version control systems seem to run in waves in the open source world. For many years, the venerable CVS had the lion's share of usage. Then along came Subversion, with the announced goal of being a compelling replacement for CVS. Subversion has gained enough popularity to be the baked-in choice in many tracking and management tools. Lately, though, I've been seeing more and more interest in git - the system used to track changes to the Linux kernel itself, among many other things.