Decentralized Beginnings, Centralized Systems: The Future of Git

April 2022 marked the 17-year anniversary of Git, which was created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish-American software engineer also known for developing the Linux kernel. There are different origin stories for the name Git but no matter what the etymology of the word is, the power of Git cannot be understated. Over the last seventeen years, Git has been adopted by millions of users worldwide who have all contributed to turning it into the most powerful distributed version control system in the world.

Git can be described as an open-source time machine – developers have access to the entire history of individual branches, and nothing is ever lost or changed. Despite the fact that Git was intended as a decentralized source code management tool, most organizations today use some kind of centralized solution to manage Git. While some purists may struggle to reconcile the increasingly centralized use of Git with its decentralized roots, there’s expansive potential for developers and organizations when using a centralized open-source platform to manage Git.

Let’s walk through the history of Git as it relates to open-source, and discuss how organizations can embrace the dichotomy between open-source and centralized systems to empower their developer teams and deploy products faster.

A launchpad for open-source

It’s safe to say that the modern state of open-source software would not be possible without Git. Before Git, most source code management tools required a constant connection to the server to complete any work – which was fine for larger enterprises, or projects with a core set of engineers, but made it difficult for developers to contribute code that could be easily merged. Git allowed developers across the world to collaborate on the same code base, launching the open-source revolution we’ve seen evolve over nearly two decades.

Git served as a proof of concept for the principle of open source in both enterprise environments and the open-source community at large. The idea that a practical solution could invite contributions from users, the way that developers flocked to Git, created a launchpad for the wide adoption of open source.

Git’s rise is all thanks to the community surrounding it. Git is a beneficiary of the individuals who collaborate and contribute ideas and features to ensure that it continues to improve and meet current developer needs. Real-time contributions from the open-source community continue to make Git more reliable, trustworthy, and stable.

Embracing innersource

Over the years, Git has become as important for proprietary software development as it has for open source projects. Although enterprises and open source projects have different goals and structures, they also face many overlapping challenges. Namely, working with large, often distributed, groups of engineers who are centered around the goal of developing excellent software efficiently. Git has continued to deliver on its promise as the world of work changes, and more organizations move toward remote or distributed workforces.

In order to get the most out of Git, enterprises must take some lessons from the open-source projects that have made Git what it is today. Namely, the principles of innersource, or adopting open-source best practices in the enterprise realm. This allows developers to be inventive and solve real problems while still working within the guardrails of enterprise environments.

Transparency is critical to the success of developers in an enterprise environment. In order to be successful and move at the speed of development, enterprises need to provide developers with a platform that gives them access to all of the information and context required to ship faster. Often, developers are siloed and not privy to critical information, such as the results of security scans. By providing access to security and observability tools, developers have more visibility across the production timeline.

Git is a true open-source success story. The enterprises that give developer teams the freedom to embrace the investor mentality that has brought so much of the open-source landscape to life, will be the ones who ship faster, innovate more, and outpace their competitors.