[prerok]

Yes, development was being done in SVN but it was a huge pain. Continuous communication was required with the server (history lookups took ages, changing a file required a checkout, etc.) and that was just horribly inefficient for distributed teams. Even within Europe, much more so when cross-continent.

A DVCS was definitely required. And I would say git won out due to Linus inventing and then backing it, not because of a platform that would serve it.

[necovek]

I was involved with bzr and Launchpad: anybody using pure Git hated it. GitHub, even with fewer features compared to LP, was pretty well regarded.

Yes, kernel and Linus used it, but he used a proprietary VCS before that did not go anywhere anyway, really.

[CamouflagedKiwi]

> changing a file required a checkout

SVN didn't need checkouts to edit that I recall? Perforce had that kind of model.

[prerok]

As did cvs. But you are right.

I am not sure, it seems I did misremember. Though it's possible I was actually working with needs-lock files. I can definitely see a certain coworker from that time to put this on all files :/

[simiones]

And even in P4, you could checkout files only at the end, kind of like `git add`. Though this could provide some annoyance if someone had locked the file in the upstream.